


The World of Tomorrow

by TheLightdancer



Category: DCU (Comics)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 01:36:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 28,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17992352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: The year is 1938, and war looms in the divided nations of Europe and already flames in Asia. Secret experiments have transformed the young Hugo Danner, Le Colorado, into a man faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. As the immortal superman begins to grasp the challenges of the new era, humanity encounters Dark Gods and the future shadows of true Supermen yet to be. In the midst of the chaos, The World of Tomorrow is beginning to dawn.





	1. The Gladiator of Prague

_Prologue:_  
  
Czechoslovakia, 1938:   
  
For Conrad Henlein the day would always be one he'd remember. He was driving together with a few of his cohorts to meet with people to set up another of the rallies the Fuhrer had set up for the sake of stirring up the Sudeten issue. There had been rumors that _Le Colorado,_ a man froom the First World War who'd been stated to be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap both tall buildings and a massive artillery barrage in a single bound was now slumming here as an expatriate. The Fuhrer and interestingly some new advisor of his named the Ultra-Humanite, of all improbable names, in charge of what was evidently the very appropriately-named Todt Program, had warned him to avoid _Le Colorado_. But unfortunately for Henlein his driver made a wrong turn on the road.   
  
Right in front of them was a man, evidently a very powerful, well-built man who was by all indications a lead-in for a boxer. His shirt was blue, with a yellow Pentagon on it, the Pentagon having in it a symbol, which he later learned was an atomic symbol. His pants were also blue, his shoes were red. This man was calmly standing in front of the car even as Henlein shouted:   
  
 _Du Dummkopf Schweinhunde!_ and a few other words about the personal habits of the man he was unlikely to have knowledge of. As the car came closer an incredible thing happened that marked the official dawn, unknown to all humankind, of a future when Gods strode the Earth and walked like men and higher spheres began to interact with mundane humanity. The man suddenly braced himself, grabbed the car, and lifted it clear in the air, before slamming it into the ground and dislodging both Henlein and his three compatriots, before then throwing the car a long distance in what seemed an effortless gesture. Bending down next to Henlein, he heard an English-speaker's voice, evidently American, say:   
  
Supermen, huh? You don't look so super to me.   
  
It was then that Henlein saw something that made him blink his eyes as though he were insane. The man in question literally leaped into the air far and high, and it seemed at the height of the leap's parabola that he was almost flying........  
  
__________________  
  
Hugo Danner continued to leap until he'd leapt straight through a confused Reich that had no idea how to react to a human doing just this. His leaps had brought him into a France that actually, to his surprise, instead of hating and fearing him hailed the return of _Le Colorado_. The last time the First World War had ended before he could bring justice to the world. This time, he vowed, after a madman was rising and vowing to do this all over again he'd show these so-called Supermen in Germany and the Man of Steel in Russia what true power was. For in Danner's view power was not found in legions of armored troops, be they the new, upgraded tanks or in the eerie, pseudo-medieval knight-like garb that was rumored to be appearing in the Soviet Union, of all places.   
  
No, power was in having the might of a being who could bring justice to the needy, and it was time that a true Superman was born.......


	2. You Are a Wonder, My Daughter

As Hugo Danner landed, relieved, in what he had previously viewed as a friendly neighborhood in Paris, he hesitated. He had barely avoided being seen and buzzed by the French Army and Air Force, his supernatural hearing enabling him to hear the awed murmurs of 'It's not a plane, it's a......man. That's right, a man. The man's fucking leaping,sir. honest!'. He had been very fortunate indeed. In the period since the 1920s his strength had already grown. Once more powerful than a locomotive, now he was by his own estimation able to lift over 1,000 tons. But his isolation had only grown. If only that fool hadn't run into him........but no. Such things, it seemed, were meant to be. He entered his apartment a mile from the Louvre, where to his surprise the young Russian neighbor of his, Sasha Lucharsky, was waiting for him.   
  
"Greetings, Comrade Colorado....." the surprisingly deep voice of Lucharsky said in perfect, unaccented English.   
  
"I am glad to see you. My son, Lionel, is with my wife, if you were wondering. They have left for the United States. You might say that they've even gone to the new City of Tomorrow. Nothing so behooves citizens of the Worker's and Peasant's Republic like going to a slum named for suicide. And can you believe it, Comrade, the Leader has assigned me a simple task: bring in the old war hero. But now, let me ask you this......have you heard of the rumors of the Men of Steel at Lake Khazan?"   
  
"Lucharsky, what the Hell is the matter with you? You drunk? I mean really, I come in after a long day and you're talking like this? What, have you been reading those pulps?".   
  
Lucharsky smiled and then moved his sleeve up, displaying a wristwatch-like device. 

"The Politburo originally wished this program, Le Colorado, to be called the Metallo. The Leader, however, wanted a more appropriate name. He chose the name Stalinik, Men of Steel. I find it.....appropriate. And in truth it will be brilliant. Who better to bring in a Gladiator of a lost cause than I, who will save my family from the charge of defection from the Worker's and Peasant's Republic thereby?".   
  
Smiling, Lucharsky then pressed a button on his wristwatch, which began to glow and to send a strange, glowing energy all over his body, beginning with his hand and his right arm, then his torso. Then his other arm, then his legs and feet and his head. The energy glowed brightly, bright enough to stun all so unfortunate enough to gaze into it, but when it subsided it formed a metallic skin-like substance covering Lucharsky's body. Eyes that had been grey were now green, encased by a substance that seemed otherworldly. Lucharsky's voice was now deeper, more ominous.   
  
"And now, Le Colorado, I give you something you have never seen before. Power equal in full to your own!"   
  
With this Lucharsky walked calmly to the surprised Hugo Danner, who was first scratching his head, wondering why his life was turning supernatural all of a sudden, and punched Danner straight in the gut. Laughing madly, Lucharsky then looked at Danner, no longer confused. Now, now Hugo Danner was angry.   
  
"Aw shi-" and then Hugo Danner punched Lucharsky with a blow that had a strength able to move one thousand tons behind it. In a single bound Lucharsky cleared the environs of Paris, landing, stunned at the power of the blow in the marshes of St. Gond. As he got up, wheezing, he wondered how a single man had done what Japanese tanks, rifles, and trucks running right into this armor had never managed to in Lake Khazan. Fortunately his mouth shield kept him from drowning, but he was even more awed when Danner landed right in front of him with a loud squelching sound, feet planted squarely in the marches.   
  
Lucharsky held his armor, wheezing. "A rib. You dirty bastard, you broke my ri-" only for Danner to come closer to him. Raising his open palm solemnly, Danner proceeded to deal a powerful slap that left Lucharsky out cold. When Danner lept away it would be three days before agents of the NKVD found his body, head and facial armor smashed in with what seemed an overpowering force, the impression of a hand left on his face.   
  
_________________________  
  
25 September, 1938:   
  
Hugo Danner, relaxing calmly on the _SS Saint Mary_ opened his newspaper. Dressed anew in a business suit, he calmly smoked a cigar. It would be during his relaxing and smoking that he glanced at several headlines. The first was predictable: _Themyscira offers mediation of Sudeten Crisis._ He snorted. Themyscira indeed. A nation supposedly inhabited only by women and which preserved intact the culture of the Hellenistic era. Right.....what it probably was was a relic of some bygone age shrouded in myth. The second headline that caught his attention, however, made him pay much closer attention. It seemed that in Chicago, the great Metropolis of the modern age a strange kind of figure appeared.   
  
_Owing inspiration to the legendary_ Le Colorado _of the Great War, it seems that new figures have already begun to dot the landscape. These mystery men, such as the Crimson Avenger of Gotham and_ _a masked man with a shield named Guardian in the great Illinois Metropolis, have introduced themselves in suitably charismatic fashion. Is this a new trend or is it simply the product of a new age? Only time shall tell._  
  
'Masked Vigilantes?' Danner sniffed, and then opened the sports section. 'Ah it'll never catch on.'   
  
_________________________  
  
 _The Central Square of Themyscira City, 30 September 1938:  
  
_ Queen Hippolyta looked fondly at her daughter.   
  
"Diana, my lovely child, you truly are a wonder."   
  
Diana, product of arts that Themyscira shielded from the outside world turned to look to her mother.   
  
"I am honored you say so, my mother."   
  
"Artemis brings a report from Paris. The Soviet Union has indeed begun making its Men of Steel and has used one on that man from the last great war of the world of Men."   
  
"Why is their concern anything of our own?"   
  
"My daughter, this man who calls himself a Leader in Germany and the other one in Russia, the Man of Steel, neither of them will tolerate our presence so near to their interests if we do not act for ourselves. An island blessed by Great Zeus Olympios and Hera Basileia and which is the very center of Hestia herself? The National Socialists shall declare us mad for not accepting the rule of men, the Communists for declaring Gods not only exist but privilege some over others. No, we must send forth a champion, blessed with power to move mountains and to divert rivers.   
  
The time of isolation, when we were shielded by ignorance and the inability of kings to direct their men against us for fear of our technology is over. If not now, then in a year, or two years, or ten Themyscira shall be besieged. The man from the first war, though he lift cars or leap tall buildings in a single bound will not be enough. His presence is a sign that this age of wonders has begun. It is a new world now, my wonder woman, it is a world of tomorrow. And the ways of yesterday cannot suffice.   
  
I shall send you forth as a woman of wonder, O daughter mine, that the world of Men shall bow the knee to the return of the Amazons. And in going forth to strike for Themyscira, lose not sight of this: the lasso that you carry compels all who are bound with it to do your will. Use it wisely. The bracelets you carry forestall the beserk rage of a woman that the mortals shall offend the Gods by comparing you to. Do not let them remove them lest they wish their cities and their armies and their machines of war laid waste. Now go forth, O Wonder Woman, and determine that conquest shall be deterred, and war be halted!"   
  
Diana then looked at her mother for a pause that stretched on seemingly into eternity. "And if the world of Men persists in its folly and is not afraid of me, a single woman?"   
  
Hippolyta's blue eyes flashed with a ferocity that made even Diana pause. "Then give it all that it desires until it chokes upon its own power. But first, I would have you meet this man from Colorado. A man like him will seek a modern city, a Mother-City for a man of tomorrow. Look for him in Chicago."   
  
Diana then bowed before her mother and took off in the air, flying with both arms in front of her. Hippolyta then smiled. "And I know that you shall not fail. Even if the Leaders Two desire a war, they shall not be so arrogant as they would otherwise be."   
  
_______________________________  
  
 _Berlin, 3 October 1938:_  
  
"So, my Leader, it is confirmed, then?"   
  
The sinister bald scientist in immaculate SS uniform turned to the hesitant face of Adolf Hitler, whose face was marked with a warring frustration from a war denied him and no slight fear of the advisor of his Siegfried Force.   
  
"Yes, my dear friend. It is confirmed. The Bolshevik agent killed with that hand was killed by the same man that attacked Comrade Henlein in Prague."   
  
The Ultra-Humanite then turned to Hitler. Brushing a speck of dust off his immaculate Oberst-Gruppenfuhrer insignia, he said "Then I shall have to act. The rumors of the Goddess who flew past ships from that island in the Mediterranean, the Soviet Metal Men on that lake.....we are no longer the only ones unafraid of the secrets found all those years ago. As you rightly said a year ago, time draws near. We must initiate our war in under a year or our enemies will be too strong for us.   
  
Already the Mystery-Men in the United States show the legacy of the Colorado is not gone. And we do know that he is still alive, too. Not killed on some mountain side like that wretched book would have it. No.......this is a world of tomorrow, Fuhrer, where the power of men shall grow to the point that men become Gods. And in truth, Fuhrer, we cannot become greater by any means other than the will, the mind! No.....time will draw short.   
  
By September of 1939 we strike!"   
  
Then Hitler asked quietly: "And what of the man from Colorado, or the Woman-Goddess?"   
  
The Ultra-Humanite smiled.   
  
"Why we eliminate them, of course. I have a plan that involves one of the most trusted agents of my special division. I will send him to Chicago, where the Woman-Goddess I predict will be looking for Danner. Danner will be forced to unleash his tremendous might and we can gauge him as a threat. I rather doubt the Americans, though they may hate and fear him will express that sentiment openly now."   
  
The Fuhrer scoffed: "A country of beauty queens and Hollywood and you tell me that they won't hate and fear a God?"   
  
The Ultra-Humanite continued to smile good-humoredly. "No, they will not fear a God. After all, my Fuhrer, the world grows darker for them. They may even see him as a champion, which in the long term shall favor our interests. For if he becomes the champion of capitalism, then we may be able to play the great world conspiracy against us against each other......"   
  
Hitler leaned forward, interested..........  
  
_________________________  
  
6 October 1938, Chicago:   
  
"Mr. Danner?" Hugo Danner would always remember the day he met her. Tall, striking, as tall as he was, but swarthy. The very ideal of classical beauty. Her voice with an odd accent, Greek-like, but not quite like the Greeks he'd met before.   
  
"Yes, who are you?"   
  
"Diana Prince. A pleasure to meet you." She extended her hand. Hesitantly, he shook it...............


	3. The Man Who Smiles

_7 December, 1938:_

As the train pulled into Chicago Union Station, a man sat in it deep in thought. He wore an oversized hat and clothes that served to conceal a face that struck terror in all who saw it. A few weeks ago, he had been in Berlin, improving his venom and frustrated that the formula that made that man of power who leaps across buildings and countries with ease remained invincible to it no matter the lifeform it was used upon. One thing did worry him, a gorilla he'd experimented upon who seemed to gain power and size, but that thing had been imprisoned in a ship en route to Leningrad. Let it be the Soviets' problem.

The man had looked up, his perpetually smiling, unnaturally bleached face staring into the sinister, bald visage of the Ultra-Humanite, the SS Oberst-Fuhrer. The man had shaken his hand, utterly unconcerned and told him that he was being sent to give the Man-God a killing joke. Indeed, his code-name, the Joker, was by now one of the most feared names in Berlin. At times falling into the vat of the Ultra-Humanite's chemicals almost seemed worth it when even monsters like Odilo Globocnick had their knees knocking in terror at the mere sight of him. The man sighed as his train pulled into the station and he stepped out with his seemingly oversized luggage. He was now headed to the Sheridan Trust and Savings Bank. If he was going to introduce himself and draw the Man-God, it should be in a style that would indicate that the age of men that had been was over. A new era, the era of the Fantastic, had come.

And in truth it would be fitting if the silly joke that was America met its first encounter with a new brand of forcing justice on an unjust world in the favor of a madcap man who'd call himself a clown prince of crime. Why he just knew that the poor civilians who met him would die laughing............

______________________________

_7 December 1938, S.T.A.R. Labs, Chicago, Illinois:_ An experimental laboratory for scientists who sought to explore the new age that was dawning, S.T.A.R. Labs was a place that was designed to be nondescript. Looking like an ordinary office building, it would have been astonishing to see many of the most brilliant men in current fields of science present. One of the men, however, was a colonel in the US Armed Forces, Allan Scott, who was quietly fiddling with an old-school pocket-watch as the speaker gave a lecture that he had heard so many times before that almost anything seemed more interesting.

One of the scientists, Barry Allan, however, leaned forward, face agape. He was different only in being overt in expressing what all the other scientists inducted newly into this program felt:

"In the year 1898, a sign and wonder occurred over our planet. Insofar as we can understand an extraterrestrial space fleet fought a not-insignificant battle over our planet's atmosphere. Why this happened, we don't know. After forty consistent years of effort, we have yet to crack the codes written in that extraterrestrial language. If there is one language, which we are also as yet unable to identify. Of the fleet, if there was one fleet, the greater part of the damaged ships and technology were incinerated in Earth's atmosphere.

Some parts of it, however, did survive. Insofar as we can detect parts of it fell into the ocean and their fate, if there was such a fate, remains unknown. The ship parts that fell into the United States were found with a deranged farmer named John Jones, who spoke of a battle among empires in the stars, but that what had befallen the Earth was a mere skirmish in a great war we cannot understand. He was dismissed as a crackpot and his views are not considered reliable. Of those parts one legacy is already known in what was essentially a clever propaganda move. One of our first biologists affiliated with this project, Abednego Danner, developed a serum that is now an essential component of treating major injuries. This serum, when exposed to an adult, enables them to go so far as to regenerate an entire lost arm. Danner used this formula on himself and so managed to regrow an arm he'd lost in a tragic accident involving an automobile he'd purchased. The regeneration, however, has altered the genetics of everyone who has used it. Some men who use this serum are rendered infertile, but Danner himself was not. His son, Hugo, distinguished himself in the First World War as one of the most powerful soldiers in the entire war. Bombs hit him directly with no effect. He intimidated some of the best German marksmen by proving himself faster than a speeding bullet. he gained minor injuries from the heaviest artillery shells. He was more powerful than a locomotive, destroying a German gun that would have been able to strike Paris."

As Dr. Nelson continued to speak he then paused and showed them a video that captured this particular feat. Le Colorado literally leaped into the path of an onrushing train that held a massive gun that had yet to fire. Standing in front of it, he braced himself and instead of being thrown back with the recoil, the train literally derailed and cars fell out and piled all around each other, before leaping into the cars and lifting out a gigantic artillery piece that he threw into the sky and then punched to the ground with sufficient force that it splintered, landing unharmed.

Then, speaking equally calmly and matter of factly he showed one of the great Belgian Cathedrals in the ending day of the war.

"And he leaped tall buildings in a single bound." The scientists all gasped in awe at Danner's leaping the Cathedral effortlessly, before landing in front of a German A7V tank that was lifted up single-handedly and thrown with a force that defied all conventional physics.

"After the war, however, Danner chose to disappear for a time, doing odd jobs including an archaeological dig in Mexico, where he evidently discovered that the serum in question had components that have appeared elsewhere in the world, all around the same time. After meeting with an oddly still very young-looking John Jones, however, Danner disappeared off our contact list until recently, when he encountered the Nazis in Czechoslovakia and then confirmed that the Soviets have also discovered this technology.

One thing that we have learned, however, is that the alien artifacts being fought over included an object where two surviving aliens tried to kill a third one that had it. While we have retained and experimented upon their corpses, we have yet to identify what this ring-like object is, as it is only one of the objects we have discovered. Our military liaison, Colonel Scott, has done intensive study on a green ring that fell in another situation and which evidently has a power source we have only recently identified. The ring, more oddly, responds only to Dr. Scott at present. The first object, however, is a golden, round ring that is seemingly unmarked. Some extremely odd experiments have been conducted upon it, but only one seemed to garner any response. I ask when I show you this that any gentlemen who have eaten please find either a garbage can or a bag as we would rather not see what you've had for lunch. Those that haven't, you, gentlemen, are quite lucky indeed." 

The scene showed a man reading from a book and having the ring-like object on his finger.

"The man you see is reading from a book by of all people Aleister Crowley. Due to repeated attempts to use all scientific means to determine the nature of the weapon having failed, the assumption was that one more would not do great harm. What occurred you shall see." 

The man spoke a spell and for a brief moment a reddish light flared at the top of the ring, and then the man screamed as his body literally caught fire. Instead of ordinary third-degree burns he turned into a briefly moving statue that crumbled into dust as he reached to try to get the ring off, screaming 'Help me!' in a single wail. The sound of vomiting filled the room for about five minutes thereafter.

After some time Dr. Nelson continued his speech:

"So far this and the formula and various biological aids are all that we have known we have developed. There are rumors, which as have been noted Hugo Danner confirmed, that the Soviets had discovered technology of this sort that the Tsar was never able to fully develop into a practical weapons platform. We do not as yet have any confirmation of how an ordinary human and ordinary weapons fare against these devices, as Danner is anything but ordinary." 

The lecture would continue on further for a long time, and as the work day ended Colonel Allan Scott decided to enter into the official log yet another experiment with the green ring. Taking the green lantern-like object rumored to be its power source, Allan Scott decided to try a poem that had haunted his dream in a chorus sung by a bizarre set of little blue men.

"In Brightest Day, in Blackest Night, Let all who are evil beware my sight, Beware my power, Green Lantern's Light!".

The ring suddenly flared and Colonel Scott screamed as he suddenly vanished into what seemed thin air, awakening to the ethereal chorus from his dream, speaking to him in a manner he understood not:

_Hello, Allan Scott of Earth. We are the Guardians of Oa........._

_________________________________

8 December 1938: 

 

The Joker, after having gotten cold feet in visiting the bank he intended to rob after a strange sensation when crossing an otherwise-nondescript office building, was now visiting Sheridan Trust and Savings Bank. Retaining his garb, he would smile when he threw it off in the middle of the bank, revealing his unnaturally white face in the painful permanent maddening grin, in a purple suit with a green tie, his green hair frizzled from the hat he'd worn. Smiling as always he then raised a gun and fired it into the air.

The thunder of the gunshot was then followed by a flag that said "Bang!" and the Joker smiled as people crouched. Then an angry security guard ran toward the Clown Prince of Crime, who pulled the trigger again. The flag then landed right in the man's throat and he fell over flopping.

"Good, bad, I'm the clown with the gun." And then the Joker turned to the frightened crowd and said "Now, I want access to the vault. Do it."

The frightened tellers rushed to comply...........

But unknown to the Joker, behind him was a man who was dressed in a seemingly nondescript outfit of a blue shirt with a yellow triangle, and red pants. Hugo Danner coughed..........


	4. In Brightest Day

The Guardians of Oa then all appeared in unity, speaking before Allan Scott, who was transfixed at the strange, childlike figures of these blue men who radiated a Power that made his body tingle seemingly down to the least atom. Their oddly resonant voices began to speak

_Allan Scott of Earth, your planet faces a grave and terrible danger. A battle fought in space has left a deadly weapon whose creator even now seeks this device. The Rings of Azar will bring to your world a threat your champions remain too few to meet. As of the_ _present you have but one champion of power sufficient to face the_ _Azar, but a champion who will be v_ _ulnerable unless he is joined by six others. Of the seven there now are but_ _three. Your task is to destroy this weapon or if not able to destroy it to bring it here. Here, the home of the Green Lantern Corps, we can protect the Ring and your planet from its author,_ _for we are its greatest enemies at present. You must go to your world and befriend the Amazonian, and the man from Colorado. But be warned, there are beings out there that are human in form, yet if exposed to the rays of your son and hostile to you, you shall discover th_ at your kind has foes powerful enough to end worlds.

If we cannot spare your world their arrival until the seven are gathered together, we will at least limit what damage they can do.

Scott then asked: "What do I say to power this Ring?" 

He then beheld a red alien that looked both humanoid and oddly like a vaudeville villain. Speaking through the Translator in his ring, the alien said:   
**  
I am Thal Sinestro. I shall teach you the Oath that all members of this Corps swear. You spoke it before, when the Guardians told you.**

**In Brightest Day, in Blackest Night, Let all who are evil beware my sight, behold my power, Green Lantern's Light!**

Sinestro then turned to Scott:   
**  
If you should need my aid, or the aid of the rest of the Corps, merely think it and your Ring will summon ours. These Rings of Azar are very dangerous indeed. There is only one planet that has seen one fall on it and escaped the harm that befalls it when the Azar decides to claim the Ring. Not all sectors are so fortunate as to be able to rely upon the power of the Highfather of New Genesis, either.**

**The only limit to this Ring is your own will. Use it wisely, and your world withstand even the might of a Kryptonian under the yellow or blue stars of outer space. Now, return to your world. The lantern must be used only in the event that the Ring draws low on power, otherwise the Ring will summon the form of the Corps and the power itself. Good luck.**

 

Allan Scott then felt the sensations of the Guardians transporting him across time and space, only to be violently jostled by an impact with something he did not understand........  
___________________________

_Chicago, Unit_ e _d States, the same day:_

"Mr. Danner, is it?"

"That's right. Whom am I addressing?" 

"Please, allow me to introduce myself.  I am a prince of laughter and of amusement. I am the Clown Prince of Crime. You, my friend, are still more of a clown than I."

Not amused, Danner then saw the Joker's leg had less the limp that he had expected and instead the Joker pulled out both a Tommy Gun and a drum magazine. Swearing for a second in German, the Joker opened fire on Danner, only to gaze in awe when the bullets bounced off of Danner harmlessly. Dropping the gun, the Joker backed away, hands up, furtively watching Danner. Then Danner moved with a speed that defied vision, seemingly only a blur to those who saw him and to the Joker an iron hand clamped around his neck and arm.

Then the blur did something even more impossible. He leapt over the Chicago skyline with ease, following this by clearing all of Lake Michigan and landing ina deserted area in Michigan. The Joker, face frozen in that permanent maddening grin had eyes marked by clear, unrelenting fear. That fear only deepened when he saw that the men who stood before them were agents of the US Marshal's service, who saluted 'Le Colorado' without any hesitation whatsoever. Licking his lips, the Joker reflected that all things considered, perhaps picking a target who could clear a lake in what looked very like flight but was not was a bad idea. Upon seeing Danner leap again and again look as though he flew over Lake Michigan, the Joker wished that he'd been assigned the Crimson Avenger instead. How was one to be a gladiator against a man-god? 

________________

_Kryptonopolis, Krypton, earlier that day:_

"Jor-El, please, listen to me! We know that you are right.  Fifty years more and Krypton's own existence will be no more. You have seen what they've done to Non! Please, Jor-El, we both love Krypton, we must do this."

Jor-El looked at Dru-Zod in his chambers and sighed, hands in his face.

"I do not want saving my planet to mean that we revive ways of conquest we should have abandoned long ago. War is not the answer. My friend, what I do I do for your own safety and that of Non and Ursa. The Council has demanded your arrest and my handing you over to be slain. I cannot do that. You know the truth. The Phantom Zone, that otherworldly realm discovered by my ancestor in bygone ages, will keep you safe until such time as I can bring you freedom. The Council will listen. They must."

"What?" 

Zod, Non, and Ursa were stunned when Jor-El quietly, with tears in his eyes pressed a button that began to form a beam of Eldritch Nature.

"Jor-El, if you betray us, and Krypyton itself this way, you and your heirs will one day kneel before me when I have delivered our planet from the Green Death. You will kneel before Zod, Jor"-and then the eldritch beam began to swallow up the three Kryptonians, but Non suddenly threw a punch at Jor-El whose face fell on the button, causing the beam to begin to alter its nature. From the Phantom Zone it became a sudden portal between worlds. As Zod, Non, and Ursa vanished the last scream that "You will kneel before Zod for his treachery" echoed in a prolonged and unnatural fashion. As the beam called them, only Jor-El glimpsed the form that threw Ursa, protesting into the zone, a form that resembled that of his own ancestor Kem-L.

Yet after Non's sucesss in giving him a concussion, Jor-El could not be sure, even when questioned by the Kryptonian High Council. In the absence of evidence to prove otherwise, the former Supreme High Commander, Dru-Zod, Non, and Ursa, officially traitors to Krypton, were deemed officially dead.

____________________________

_Three Days later, the outskirts of Moscow, USSR_ :

In later years what was recognized to be the first Kryptonian incursion to Earth began in unexpected fashion by all parties involved. Two of the just-awakened Kryptonians realized that they were lying in a field, surrounded by men in a strange type of garment that was akin to plate armor. This armor was not form-fitting by any means, having a crude and blocky appearance. Some, what were later surmised by Zod to be the leaders, had crimson armor, the rest wore armor that differed in appearance solely in hue.

It had been a bright and cloudless day, and by now the three strange visitors from another planet had absorbed a power they only discovered when a man from the Metallo Corps reached roughly to grab Non, whose eyes suddenly burned with a reddish pair of beams that cut off the man's head with a contemptuous ease, producing a nasty hissing steam and squelching, as well as molten metal. This produced a great panic where the two Kryptonians were bombarded with a type of energy beam Zod recognized as derived from the technology of Tameran. When the blasts subsided, both Zod and Non stood completely unscathed, clothes not so much as singed. Zod, realizing that this was the fabled power of a yellow Sun that he had heard so much of, turned to Non.

"These are enemies. Kill them."

Non smiled, and then suddenly lifted into the air, hovering silently over the awed soldiers of the Staliniki, unleashing a wave of frigid air that froze them all in place. Then as they began to freeze, Non's eyes lit again with the awesome might of heat vision, the combination essentially steaming the entire force of soldiers in powered armor alive.

Smiling ferociously, Zod then decided that his first priority would be to find a way to preserve this effect so that he could go back to Krypton and give both the Council and the House of El his reserve in a very personal fashion indeed.

As he smiled, neither Zod nor Non realized that above them, the figure of Kem-L bathed his body in the power of a yellow Sun, having heard the vows of Zod for vengeance on his house. Vengeance indeed! Zod would learn that bathed in the power both of a yellow Sun and continual exploration of this power that a simple-minded soldier was no match for the House that had first discovered this factor, and with it had brought Krypton both the need for the Zone and the first man to commit crimes with that power. Ten thousand years was too long. By Rao, the power of this Sun felt so right.

So, too, did Kem-L hear Zod speaking to himself about vengeance and the need to preserve the effect. _Clearly he has only read about this power, or otherwise...._

With perfect serenity Kem-L inverted his body, forming an upside down Y. As he began to descend into Earth's atmosphere, a planet already rattled by the appearance of a Superman in Chicago would discover that Earth was more isolated and more vulnerable than ever it had known........  
 


	5. The Axe is at the Root of the Trees

The first inkling Zod and Non had of the future was when their ears picked up the slight and then growing sound not unlike a falling bomb or missile. Looking upward, Zod was astonished to see that not only was it neither a bird nor a plane, it was the steadily careening form of the old war criminal.....

"Kem-L. Oh, dear."

When Kem-L collided with both of them, the impact was registered on seismographs worldwide. The astonishment and fear marked the harbinger, or so it appeared, of an entirely new era.

_______________________

_New York City, the same day:_ It was then that Yolanda Azania came. None could place what nationality she seemed. Blonde and blue-eyed, seemingly the very perfection of the ideologues of Berlin, her accent seemed vaguely Spanish, and there was the unsettling experience for all who heard her that they heard her not in English alone but in their own, true speech. Taller than most men, let alone women, Yolanda Azania seemed like nothing so much as the prophets of old, come forth once again to haunt that which they did see.

Her voice, seemingly normal, left a vague impression none who heard it could quite place. Not only was it a voice that carried without microphones, but it touched the heart and the mind and left the smell and bristling hair of fear. Dogs did not bark, however, when they saw her. They whined and often broke and ran from their masters. Cats did bristle and hiss, but a simple gaze from her led to them fleeing also. None who listened to this new-found and unknown prophet, either, could distract from themselves vague and indeterminate visions of ivory and gold, streets paved with the finest, grandest gold and houses and windows of jasper and carnelian, and a throne set in place and one who sat upon it, voice echoing from an outer world: 

_Truly Truly I say to you, the axe is at the root of the trees. All who do not heed the words of the divine flame that gnaws at the root of the trees shall burn. Do not be deceived, I come not to bring peace but a sword! A thousand thousand dangers beset your world but of these a ring of flame, made by the master of the flame that dies not is the greatest. I who speak to you testify to you these things: there are three things that testify to the flame. The spirit, the mind, and fear. The spirit hears and knows the resonance of higher lifeforms and the exalted planes, as above the mewling and simpering masses as the sky is above the maggot that gnaws at the putrescent corpses that infest so much of the soil._

_Truly, truly I say to you: of all the threats that faces you, the most dangerous are not the ones whose eyes burn like stars, who throw planets as though they are toys to children. The threats that are greatest come when Gods walk among Men and do whatever it is that they choose. Today a man leaps across countries, tomorrow the theft of a single golden ring levels cities to the ground! Beware to them who have stolen the Flame eternal, you cannot control it, it shall consume you!_

  
The spell that held the crowd entranced then temporarily disappeared and each tried to figure out how they had been so rapt in attention to the ravings of a lunatic and more frighteningly where Yolanda Azania had gone.......

________________________________

When Zod and Non awoke, the first battle of a new sort began with Zod and Non firing their heat vision into the body of Kem-L who was utterly unphased. Smiling he then watched as the two lunged toward him and then clapped his hands in a single thunderous burst of sound that led to both men falling to the ground unconscious before him. That was just too easy, Kem-L reflected as he then rocketed into the sky, arms in a Y-position. If Krypton's greatest general was so powerless and the brute likewise, his future as God-Emperor of this planet was assured.

The Soviets, meanwhile, dispatched a Metallo commander to take down Kem-L by ambushing him from above, only for Kem-L to turn around and then fire heat vision from his eyes, resulting in the discovery a few hours later of a thoroughly charred corpse in molten armor.........while Zod and Non, meanwhile had flown off to recuperate at the Earth's poles, sustaining their power in the land of the midnight Sun. Kem-L, meanwhile, had begun to fly toward the city that humanity called London, confident that his ability to build and to sustain his empire was to begin with the conquest of this primitive world from the northern latitudes south......


	6. Manhunter Rising:

As he flew over to London, Kem-L had reached near to the speed of light and had then ascended high above the city, before hurling himself downward on both feet with a velocity capable of creating the results that did ensue. The shockwave broke glass in a radius that encompassed the entire city to thirty miles beyond it in a square mile radius, the flame that had come complete with that descent burning multiple buildings and panicked crowds alike, creating a grim scene of horror and carnage as the Kryptonian then began to walk calmly along the street, unfazed by the howling mobs and baying victims of what he had begun with. Only one man, a mysterious drifter known as John Jones, stood in his way.

In Kryptonian, Kem-L spoke:   
_  
Pathetic. One native alone has a death wish._

In Martian, John Jones replied:

_Enough of this! Leave now and I will let you leave of your own will._

Kem-L responded in shock: 

_Martians are all dead, aren't they?_

John Jones said:   
 _  
I repeat, leave now and you will leave of your own will._

Kem-L snarled.

_And how, now, do you plan to remove me?_

John Jones smiled and said in Kryptonian: 

  _Like this.  
_  
Moving as fast as Kem-L himself had done, John Jones flew up with Kem-L well outside the vincinity of London's skyline and the air ceiling of contemporary aircraft. Jones then drew his fist back, and pre-empted the fist by colliding his knee right into Kem-L's groin, resulting in a high-pitched mewing sound followed by John Jones's fist colliding with Kem-L with sufficient force that he was to experience for the first time the sensation of being hit with force sufficient to hurl him across continents, islands, and seas, landing in the Indian Ocean just south of the Horn of Africa. After waking up, gasping and choking on the water, he decided in rage to lift himself up into the air and prepared to strike back when his keen ears heard the words 'this damned ring's killed yet another poor dumb fuck who was trying to use magic. Are we running an anti-scam program here or what?'.

Smiling at the thought of what a Kryptonian could do empowered with the rumored deadly might of a Ring of Azar, Kem-L then turned west, heading for the United States. When he was over the middle of the Atlantic, however, he was astonished to see another figure who displayed a power he could not comprehend.

This one was dressed in the deliberately gauche, gaudy clothes of the prophetess Yolanda Azania. This did not itself disturb Kem-L. No, what disturbed him was that as he righted himself in the air that Yolanda Azania gazed at him with an oddly unnatural look, head tilted at a wrong angle, face marked only by a slight smirk.

Then he heard a word from a voice feared even in the Phantom Zone:

**Kryptonian........**


	7. It's a Bird, It's a Plane

It had been months since Kem-L had last seen Zod, Non, or the strange Martian. It had equally been months since that strange entity he had encountered had hurled him into the depths of the sea where he had emerged and sunned himself until his power recovered. Such were the primitive minds of these inferior apes, however, that the dramatic events of that time had seemed to recede. While the United Kingdom had begun to accelerate its rearming, he was not sure whether or not his dramatic arrival in what he knew now as London had been the cause or the threats from that primitive simpleton in charge of the Empire without an Emperor. In the course of his time since then, Kem-L had made great exploitation of the Kryptonian mind's abilities to learn human speech. In the course of learning human languages, Kem-L had come to favor Mandarin Chinese, seeing in its simple yet complex grammatical structure a language suitable to the would-be conqueror, and more importantly in its writing a script so opaque that he could conceal his ambitions openly. 

    Kem-L had in his hands the major newspaper of 1930s New York, a newspaper that had arisen with the coming of new media as part of a global media engine. This newspaper, _The Daily Planet,_ covered the incident where Adolf Hitler's armies were marching into Czechoslovakia. The Leader (Kem-L spared a second to groan internally at the unimaginative titles of these primitive despots. This seemed rather unbelievable. How even primitives could aspire to the power of Gods making men new without suitable titles.....) had claimed that his armies were marching as a means of protecting the new state in a hostile world where it was now known that men could have eyes that burned like suns and breath like howling gales. It was with a carefully hidden smile that Kem-L saw that this man, the architect of so much simple-minded brutality, had referred to the great clashes between himself, Zod, and Non as part of some demented plot on the part of the Yehudim. From all Kem-L had seen if that people had that power, it was unsuited to wield it, but he was not at all sure why the demented conspiracies of primitives should focus on such people instead of on the shadowy tones of true power.

   Kem-L, however, was very offended to see this Leader in Germany promising to make a New Man who was the superior race. Perhaps, after he had returned to Krypton and gathered a sufficient-sized force to overwhelm the entire planet he would personally eviscerate that hut-dweller, but time would tell. He continued to turn the page and then prepared to meet his secretary, hearing her footsteps well before she knocked on the door.

"Mr. Gabriel?" 

"Yes, Penny?"

"Your eight-O'Clock is here to see you."

"Thank you Penny," 

     He smiled. It would be a matter of time, but if he had enough time to build the El-Corporation into a cartel with influence on the material capable of producing matter and antimatter, he could begin creating a portal that would return him to Krypton. He carefully avoided fuming about one of the stories he'd seen, where a vigilante known only as the Green Lantern had prevented a major famine in China, where a war was ongoing on a grand scale. This hero had managed in the process to down a major air strike by Japanese fighters and to likewise provide the first basis for a kind of counterstrike force. So long as the Green Lantern Corps had an aggressive agent on this planet, he would need to move very carefully indeed.

__________________________________

_A breadline, New Orleans, LA:_ General Zod ensured that Non, in carrying the bread that both were intending to eat that day, did not drop it and that Non did not initiate another brawl. In this new life, until both could find some way to return to their home planet, Zod and Non had also needed new names. Zod had decided to name Non Lennie, and to take for himself the name George. They were primitive, human names, but they would do. He had overheard thanks to that extraordinary hearing of the work the Green Lantern was doing in China. As Zod bore the primitives no great grudge, he hoped that this would continue.

Seeing a flyer for the El-Corporation's Research and Development sector recruiting, Zod calmly breathed in and out before biting into the bread. He could not yet challenge Kem-L. It was a hard reality to accept, but a good general did not start wars recklessly. And this was a war that he was incapable of winning. It was in that context that Zod had heard three things he was very interested in also, snippets of conversations that included the latest deed of the Crimson Avenger, pursuing a criminal who had conducted an excessively brutal breakout and was now inaugurating a new wave of terror. This man, the Joker, interested Zod. So did another snippet, referring to rumors of a man who ran so fast that he could not be seen, rumors pooh-poohed as people needing to be excited about every new flash in the pan.

Then there was the most interesting statement of them all. A man named Le Colorado, who could leap tall buildings in a single bound working with a woman who looked vaguely Greek-ish. Both were going to be speaking before Chief of Staff Craig about the grave matters that had recently occurred. As Zod stewed on these matters, he would see for himself the charismatic doomsayer Yolanda Azania, as she once again appeared in New Orleans.

Only this time was to be slightly different. As she spoke, a car came careening toward her, driven by a drunk lunatic, only for her to calmly continue to harangue the crowd as the car slammed into her and the driver was thrown from it, caught on an invisible wall of force, alive and stunned with the car crunched strongly against the invulnerable body of the prophetess. Turning this to her advantage, she spoke with a sonorous power:   
_  
Truly there is a fire to be lit upon the earth, and I warn you all that even now it shall soon be kindled. A man calling himself a leader steals an entire state because of the cowardice, the inanity, the frivolity of men! Fear that future that awaits you! None know when a miracle may happen, that a man be saved and an object destroyed. Ye cannot predict it, how these precious rings of power that fate weaves around us call to us, ensuring that we claim that which is ours!_

Zod finished his meal and then said to Non "Come on Lennie, she's spoiling our afternoon." As the two strode off, Zod heard in his mind what seemed like a mocking word that he dismissed as simply his imagination. That word, **Lor-Zod** only was his own imagination wishing to hear a real Kryptonian's voice. This it was, and nothing more.


	8. Winning Friends and Influencing People With Punches to the Face

**The Baltic Micronation of Zandia, 3 April 1939:**

As Sebastian Blood VI knelt before the idol that his fathers had worshiped ever since their rumored encounter with the Great Light in the First Crusade, he did so as a fanatical devotee of a faith who had been troubled by bad dreams. His were dreams of facing a sinister woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, dressed in a white mantle that encompassed her all around, bird-like in form. Hearing this being telling him that none would control her, and finding himself carried in the arms of an angel accompanied by the mocking laughter of the being that had frightened him. He knelt in the witching hour, troubled also by the rising power out of nowhere of ElCorps, a conglomerate specializing in very odd areas of science that seemed almost magical.

He trembled also at the face of the CEO and voice of ElCorps, a man very like one of the three star-gods who had ravaged most of London. Praying with blasphemous and unholy words, he spoke calmly and smoothly. Behind him in a dark and unlit building a glowing wall of light began to exorcise the darkness, a light that seared away all shadow. Turning in a defensive stance and fumbling for his pistol, Brother Blood beheld lit by a seemingly self-generated light a man easily four times as tall and twice as big as any man alive. The man, lit by this unholy light, was dressed in a white suit, with a ruddy and vigorous appearance. His hair was blond, his eyes a blue that seemed to have the illusions of four eyes straining to emerge from two. The massive man then spoke:

**Brother Blood.**

Hearing that voice, Blood prostrated himself and spoke:

O Lord of the Outer World, God of my Fathers.

The sinister man strode up to him, and then spoke calmly:

**You are given now a great destiny to fulfill. Your great-grandson will be the harbinger of a new and terrible aeon, a veritable child of the Moon. Your grandson will meet the true Messiah of your faith, a Messiah that when he meet her she will have spurned the truth that is. Your son will first learn greater things from me. Hail, son of the morning, for yours is a new and great age.**  
  
As Brother Blood looked up, face pale and corpse-like, he asked him:

O Lord of the Outer World, have you a name? 

The being then smiled and raised his cane. His rumbling voice echoed long after the blinding flash of light that seemed a thunderclap without sound.   
****  
You need know me only as a man of wealth and taste going to and fro in the Earth and up and down in it.  
  
___________________________

April 4, 1939:

John Jones would remember his first encounter with Wonder-Woman and Hugo Danner, and the dawn of the new age of superheroes as follows. It was a day full of clashes with superheroes and the first fight with one of the great cosmic threats of another age. It was also a day that had begun when he stepped off a ship onto Boston Harbor just as he was jostled by two people. One of whom was a tall and well-built man he instantly recognized as Hugo Danner, the other of whom was an unknown equally tall and stunningly beautiful woman. The woman, however, insisted on following him, and he just as insistently had tried to defuse things.

For her part, Diana of Themyscira was intent on finding out just how this John Jones had so easily contained the star-men and whether or not this meant it was possible to fight them. As John Jones continued to rebuff her increasingly belligerent approaches, their spot-man, Allan Clark, slowly found his ring and prepared to put it on his finger. It was looking increasingly probable that there was going to be something very bad about to happen. When Diana grabbed the man's arm in a grip that in an ordinary man would have caused it to burst in a shower of blood and gore and John Jones jerked out out of her grip with power sufficient to hurt her and said: "You're making me angry. You won't like me when I'm angry."

As Allan Scott put on his ring he spoke the oath:  **In Brightest Day, in Blackest Night, Let All who are evil, beware my sight, and beware my power, Green Lantern's Light!  
**  
He had spoken it just in time as John Jones caught a punch from Diana that was powerful enough in terms of shockwaves to blast Danner through several cars into complete unconsciousness, and which blew him in his shield from Boston near to Greenland. As he flew backwards, he had time to hear J'onn J'onzz, now a tall and bulky green alien in a circus strongman's outfit with a cape, ask her:   
 ****  
Why are you attacking me?

Before smacking her with a single, equally powerful punch far to the east across the Atlantic.

Wonder-Woman had been shocked when J'onn had withstood her punch easy as he pleased, and the first inclination she had of his true power was when she woke up, levitating, over the mid-Atlantic. With J'onn J'onzz hovering over her, eyes glowing. As he prepared to repeat his question, Allan Scott zoomed back in and wrapped him in powerful chains, chains rapidly broken when J'onn J'onzz instilled just a tiny bit of doubt in his mind. As he turned toward Scott, the man shielded himself with the ring from a set of lighting super-strong blows that impacted with sufficient power to create ripples across the ocean, also blasting Wonder-Woman into the air with a telekinetic blast. As she zoomed down toward him, J'onn J'onzz then became intangible, leading to Diana hurling straight through the Manhunter, colliding into Allan Scott with sufficient force to throw them both onto Jekyll Island, where the Martian Manhunter proceeded to hover over them, arms across his chest, using telekinesis to artificially whip his cape. Eyes glowing, he repeated his earlier question:   
**  
Why are you attacking me?  
**  
As Diana prepared to strike, he sighed unpleasantly and then swept up and struck the back of her head with speed faster than she could react to with a power akin to being hit by a mountain, causing her to fall on her face, and struck Allan Scott's shield with multiple, equally fast, equally destructive blows. After Scott dropped his shield, the Manhunter turned to them and lifted them into the air, telepathically, speaking with a mental voice:   
 ****  
I am not your enemy, nor the enemy of your enemy. We are friends. We fight for the same cause. We will not fight any more against each other when our true enemies lurk at dark corners seeking to strike us in turn.

This demonstration of power was subtly accompanied by his turning their hatred and fear to understanding and acceptance, and then ordering Diana and Allan to return to Boston, where they greeted a shocked Hugo Danner, who asked them where Barry was. At that very moment, the Flash had just been turned around when approaching Jekyll Island by a voice in his head very insistent that he should return to his friends, that things would come to make sense, and that the Americas would spawn a Society for Justice.

Deciding to fly upward to assume the form of John Jones again, the Martian Manhunter sensed a strange mental presence taking off after him and seeking to shadow him. Initially confused at being followed by hostile enemies, now J'onn was furious. He turned around and hovered, feet first, in mid air.

**I do not like being followed.**

The sinister blonde face of Yolanda Azania then smiled as she said:   
  
**Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.**

It was then that J'onn, even more furious, hurled himself at her mocking face with a blinding speed......


	9. Solomon Grundy Born on a Monday:

The Martian Manhunter's fist missed Azania's face by the narrowest of margins, the prophetess's face moving out of the range of his fist at a speed too fast for the Manhunter to react.J'onn J'onzz fired his eyebeams straight into the face of Yolanda Azania, the heat from the beams slowly making the air around them shimmer with the raw power boiling off of it. The prophetess, initially unconcerned by the heat remained hovering even as the heat mounted, until J'onn finally flinched and cut off the beams, convinced she was surely dead. To his shock, not a hair on her head was singed, and the peculiar human loss of moisture from the skin didn't even appear.

Instead Azania's eyes began to glow in their own right as she moved closer to J'onzz in the sky, their bodies almost touching.

In a voice like a whisper and a thunderclap, Azania said: **Is that all you got?**  
  
J'onn then threw a massive punch strong enough to shatter mountains. She caught it in her fist with ease, and then her human face seemed less human, a deep shark-like grin full of serrated fangs replacing it, her cheeks seemingly gone and replaced by fangs too large and oversized to fit into her mouth. The impossibly wide grin that gazed at him, teeth covered in gleaming drool was the more disturbing for how the creature did not even notice that its face, still with a human-style forehead and jaw structure now looked unnatural. Even unholy.  
 **  
** **I am come to light a fire on the Earth,** he heard, before watching as a fist hurled straight at his face at a speed so blinding only Martians or Kryptonians could have detected it. Detect it he did, however, and the fist swung through his face, made intangible in the speed of time it took the fist to come near his face. Azania's body, however, eyes glowing, then glowed again as her unnatural mouth and face were superimposed on an armor of silver, cloaks of blue, a symbol of a two-headed dragon whose heads were gnawing into each other's necks, the necks crossing over each other. He gasped: 

The Azar!

Smiling, Azania then opened her mouth, unleashing the Trombone of Death, a sound that in sixty seconds reduced the Manhunter to a falling object that fell toward the ocean, enabling the Azar to fly northward. Then her sight beyond sight detected something very interesting:

Diana Prince, awoken from a trance whose purpose she could not explain, found herself holding a message from her mother, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The message warned of a fantastic type of weaponry, and that this weapon was held in a research facility in Chicago, S.T.A.R . Labs. Learning that the weapon was a power-enhancer of a horror from beyond the stars, and that there might be other interested parties seeking the nature of this device, she then turned to the Green Lantern.

"Colonel Scott." 

"Yes, Miss Prince?" 

"I wish to fly with you to Chicago. There is something there you and I need to see." 

Before he could say yes or no, Colonel Scott found himself jerked along with Hugo Danner back to Chicago at a speed that made Danner slightly queasy, but which his ring and willpower spared Scott the ill effects. As each landed, they looked with curiosity at the location they had landed near. S.T.A.R. Labs. Colonel Scott's face was marked with an eyebrow raised and his face rubbing his chin, Danner's with a dawning comprehension and fear. He even had an impression that something Up There was watching them, dark and sinister.

Smiling, the Azar then descended toward the Earth and to a grassy meadow a few miles outside of Chicago. Here lay the body of the infamous serial killer once known as Jack the Ripper, who had immigrated in the 1880s and fled justice. He had come to Chicago, where in an act of morbid cosmic justice, Jack the Ripper, under the alias of Cyrus Gold, had contracted scarlet fever and died anonymously. The sinister smiling monstrous face disappeared. 

Yolanda Azania stood before a glowing field, marked in the form of a dodecahedron. Her power shone forth in the form of the clothes she wore. No longer did she wear the clothing of the prophetess, a sari that was a brilliant mixture of greens and blues. She wore a silver armor, blue cloak billowing in an unnatural wind, the silver armor marked by massive gauntlets and boots. The armor's two-headed dragon, heads turned toward each other in an open snarl glowed with the same eldritch light as the symbol.

The words that echoed from her mouth were those of the Azar, speaking the language of Azarath. A refined and beautiful language insofar as its words were concerned, but in the echoing voice of the Azar a sound as the wind whistling over a grave. The light glowed brighter, and then a bolt of light fell from the sky upon it with a blinding flesh and a smell like ozone.

From the symbol rose a finger, then a hand punching upward from the grave. The hand was a pale, chalky white, but of an unnatural size. Though in the form of a man's hand, the height and mass of the hand were like no human hand. The arm that followed it was immense, the head that followed the arm gigantic and simian-like in nature, deep jaws covered in shadow by a massive brow-ridge, the lower jaw protruding with misshapen teeth, the eyes glowing a deep green. The form of Cyrus Gold, mutated by the power of the Azar, now towered at over 11 feet tall, many hundreds of pounds more than any human frame. A being of animate wrath and no intelligence, simple destructive power made manifest. The Azar's blue eyes were emotionless, her lips twitching slightly as she spoke to the massive zombie, saying:   
**  
There are enemies of yours to your left, in the city of Chicago. Go there and destroy everything in the city. Bring to me the skulls of the Amazon and the Green Lantern. Then destroy all that you will.**

Silent for a moment, she then spoke the words of his release:

**You are Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday.**

**  
**  
The zombie then hurled itself into the air with a leap that took it all the way to Chicago from the outskirts of Indianapolis in a single bound. The Azar smiled. It did not matter if 'Grundy' was destroyed or not, it would regenerate after every single time it was destroyed. The first of the supervillains to recur without fail upon every single death.......


	10. Dead by Dawn:

It did not breathe, and its eyes stared seemingly blankly. Yet the eyes that did not see saw with clarity, and the creature's massive face turned to them. Vast jaws that were simian in nature, protruding outward, opened and a sepulchral voice boomed forth: 

**Solomon Grundy Born on a Monday.**

The gathered combatants blinked, as the rumbling voice had more than a whisper of supernatural power about it. Then the massive chalky figure rushed toward them, and before any of them could blink, Danner was thrown through a building with ease, the Green Lantern's shield prevented him from suffering fatal injuries and instead simply being thrown to the ground and stepped on by hundreds of pounds of undead flesh, and Wonder-Woman braced her arms forward in an X-position that permitted her to halt altogether Grundy's first punch, at the price of sending shockwaves through Chicago that echoed through the city, causing the pavement to ripple and several buildings to groan as their foundations and underlying structures were shaken.

**Solomon Grundy Born on a Monday.**

Diana then snarled and dealt the creature a blow that tossed it into a desolated region of Chicago abandoned since the start of the Depression and the last incident involving Hugo Danner and the costumed criminal whose escapades in New York presented the famous Crimson Avenger with a great challenge. Grundy, however, upon landing righted itself nearly instantly, then was gripped in a set of ever-tightening bars of green light, bars that attempted to constrain the monster and deprive it of both breath and momentum. Grundy's undead eyes simply stared forward into empty space, and the monster remained motionless. When Diana arrived and saw it constrained, she sought to reach for it, only for Grundy to suddenly flex itself, the surprise breaking the Green Lantern's concentration for just a second enough that the bars shattered. Grundy then lunged forward toward Wonder-Woman, its mouth speaking yet again:

**I am Solomon Grundy.**

Growling, Wonder-Woman grasped the creature's outstretched hand and then flipped it over her, its back colliding into the ground with a loud crunching-squelch. But Grundy raised itself up again, unharmed, and with a speed that belied its mass swept one hand toward Wonder-Woman's ankle, flipping her over, and then its massive fist was caught by the Green Lantern's bars which held its wrist immobile. It was then that Hugo Danner's leap brought him into the fight with a sudden careening whisper of wind that was followed in turn by a set of lighting blows toward Grundy's chest and stomach, which smashed into the undead flesh without ill effect.

Wonder-Woman joined, her blows striking Grundy with only a set of crunches and squelches to differentiate them from Danner's blows. The monster then flexed one of its arms, sweeping forward with an open palm backhand that sent both Danner and Wonder-Woman back, in both cases both people oriented themselves by digging their heels again, digging tracks into the ground. Then Grundy yanked its other arm down, pulling the Green Lantern down with it, but the Green Lantern severed the line of green energy that kept him tied to Grundy's arm, using his ring to form a set of dagger-like objects of green light that bombarded the unthinking, uncomprehending mass that now freed of encumbrances rushed toward Danner and Diana with that same astonishing speed that belied its massive form. This time, with both Danner and Diana prepared for that speed, Grundy missed both of them and kept on running, but rapidly turned around and began to hurl itself at them again, for them to repeat the movement out of its way. Soon both decided that a different approach was in order, as it meant that Grundy was able to outrun and outpace the Green Lantern's set of missile strikes, and that both of them sustained bruises and minor cuts from them, while Grundy did not tire or show any sign of strain.

As Grundy's massive mouth opened in another shout, a figure zoomed in from the sky, green and clad in an outfit like that of a circus strongman, white, red-barred, with a blue cape. The Martian Manhunter's eyes then glowed as his heat vision surged forth, striking Grundy with a force that only increased and consumed the monster in fifteen minutes of glowing flame, leading to the massive creature crumbling into dust as it strode toward them, its massive arm dissipating into dust as its fingers came close to Hugo Danner's face.

Then the Martian Manhunter spoke:

**I believe we were about to discuss a matter the last time we spoke?**

It was with reservations that the other people nodded, as they flew (Danner transported on a pad upright through the air by the Green Lantern) to find the Flash waiting for them, beer in hand, saying "What took you guys so long?".

It was then that they heard on the radio the words that would sear into their lives:

_Today the Chancellor of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler gave a speech before the Reichstag that indicates that his empire now wishes access to the port of Danzig. The Chancellor claimed that in this era of individuals able to fly and to send the power that sets the stars alight through their eyes that kindred blood belongs in a kindred empire more than ever. The Polish government has responded to the Nazis by indicating that any act of untoward aggression where the Commonwealth of Poland is concerned will be considered a cause for war._ _Even in this age of threats which seem more than human, the Polish government argued, there is no reason for one state to seek gain at the expense of another. Berlin to this point has not given any response other than to note that the interest of the German people requires all Germans be united under a single state._

_____________________________________  
 _  
New York,_ _5 April 1939:_ Kem-L smiled at the sight of his prototypical warsuit, though the thing seemed too vast and clunky as yet for a fully justified use. This massive juggernaut was an indication that there was at least the prospect that he might be able to outmaneuver Zod and Non even if both had full access to the strength of a yellow Sun. The reports of the monster in Chicago filled the United States (and the world) with dread. One annoyance that Kem-L had encountered, however, concerned the prospect for a war in Europe. The actions of the madman in Germany were almost guaranteed to start a war that would choke off his access to his needed uranium. If he was to enrich it enough to make plutonium for a proper warsuit, he still needed to handle this problem.

Then he found another article referring to a strange helmet that had been uncovered in an archaeological dig. An archaeologist, Kent Nelson, had gone missing after strange flashes of light were recorded. How interesting. This indicated that one potential danger that might limit him really did exist. Perhaps the statements that the monster in Chicago was a mutated, monstrous corpse that walked had some truth to it.

As he continued to look into the paper, he saw with some surprise the mention of a forbidden concept known on his world as the Bertron Pit might exist here. There had been a set of gruesome murders on the outer edges of New York, and rumors had begun to spread of something called a Lazarus Pit being not only an urban legend, but perhaps a grim reality. Kem-L decided that it would be time to check into the rumors of this Ra's al-Ghul. Someone with a Bertron Pit might make either a useful ally or a threat who would kneel before the power of one who was a God among men.

________________________

_The outskirts of Chicago, 5 April 1939, Midnight:_ It was a still night, with a full moon. Yet in this field an unnatural wind and light began to glow, and a massive, paw-like hand clawed through. Inside of twenty minutes the massive form of Solomon Grundy restored itself to life, now clad in a grim parody of the kind of clothes it might have worn in life, a ragged jacket and shirt, oversized pants, its massive face looking once more uncomprehendingly at the world. The creature then leapt upward into the air, its vast oversized legs propelling it south, motivated by nothing more than the direction its body was facing as it rose from the ground, the long shout of: 

**Solomon Grundy Born on a Monday.**


	11. The Age of Miracles

_The city of Chicago, 8 April 1939:_It was Hugo Danner, clad in the yellow, red, and blue outfit of the Gladiator, who would begin a new era for Planet Earth when he, speaking before the assembled audience of the Flash, a man in red and yellow tights who fidgeted nervously at a rate sufficient enough that Hugo warily expected the wooden table to burst into flame from the friction involved, the Crimson Avenger, a man in a wide hat with a mask over his eyes, clad in a cloak, Wonder Woman who with her Amazonian physique towered over most of the men in the room, the Green Lantern, who was charging up his ring and calmly whistling a nameless tune, the mysteriously transformed archaeologist, Kent Nelson, who no longer needed to eat and promised magical power greater than any thus far seen, and the tall, jade physique of the Martian Manhunter said these words: 

"At the rate we're going, we're only getting in each other's ways. The Flash has proven essential to us by providing distractions, and the trio of the Green Lantern, Kent, Wonder-Woman, and...."

Jonn.

"Jonn....have the potential to revolutionize this masked crimefighter phenomenon. You, the Crimson Avenger, can help provide a link between the supernatural heroes of the present and the vigilantes who lack powers beyond the ordinary ability of humanity to stop. We have means, together with the government, to enable you to operate as essentially an extralegal agent. This will prevent the problem of being incapable of genuinely stopping crime.

Together, we can blaze and forge the stars anew, and create a new society, one founded for truth, justice, and the American way. If you agree, ladies and gentlemen, I suggest that we go out together with my spokesman, Dabney Donovan, and announce a new era for humanity. The founding of a Justice Society of America, one which will enable us to work to create an entirely new era. As you all know, these Soviet robot-soldiers and this supposed Sons of Dawn thing in Germany, if it exists, means that the truth will out whether or not we control it. If we go public first, for that matter, we will one-up the red and the brown and that's never as I see it anything to shun itself. Is the motion agreed?"

All the costumed figures solemnly nodded.

_The city of Atlanta,_

_9 April, 1939:_

 

The day that the Justice Society was established openly and the news flashed around the world, the prophetess Yolanda Azania spoke before the inhabitants of Atlanta with a calmness that belied the hint of the sinister in her words: 

**A thousand sorrows befall the race of men! Gods descend from the stars, walking among you, ravaging your cities with their mere presence. Leaders, so-called, bluster and bully like spoiled children over threats to that which is not theirs to be entitled to you. Yet I say to you, woe to the inhabitants of the Earth and the sea! A thousand inquities you have visited upon yourselves! A thousand knowledges you have sought without understanding. A thousand weapons you have built without comprehension. If all the sorrows of the past together could rally before you, they would stand before you now and in pity and in contempt they would abandon you!**

**For three sins of the United States and for four do I abjure it in the name of the holy and cleansing fire from beyond! For three sins of Georgia and for four do I promise that ere shadows fall upon it, there shall come with glory and with honor the power of a call from beyond another world. For four sins I call upon the inhabitants of Atlanta to kneel before the future, a future when all the cowardly servants of the Gods should be before you kneeling and when the divine wrath that was shall yield to a new future beyond time and space that will be! You allow men with power beyond the ken of ordinary men, and one lunatic of a woman who proclaims the power of Gods who have not been seen in millennia to defy your laws! You are failures-**

 

It was then that Grundy landed with a massive crunch into Atlanta's streets, roaring: 

**Solomon Grundy, Born on a Monday!**

Snarling at the interruption, Azania turned and then prepared to strike it at a speed beyond the creature's reckoning, when a pair of red beams struck from the sky and seared into Grundy's chest. As she looked with a growing pleasure, she saw J'onn J'onnzz and Wonder Woman hovering in the air, while Hugo Danner, the Green Lantern, and the Flash moved toward Grundy. The creature roared in anger and hurled its massive fists with movements that were too slow for its enemies, who bound it in the energies of the Power Ring. As it was bound, the Martian Manhunter then released a freezing gale that caught the creature in an ice that its unthinking mind did not have the wit to try to break. Then he simply flicked the ice with one super-strong finger and it crumbled down.

As the Justice Society of America then turned to the prophetess, she calmly said:   
 **  
I suppose this is where it starts, isn't it?**

Smiling, she calmly formed her hands into fists and the tatterdemalion rags she wore transformed into a silver armor, her face hid within a hood, blue eyes now glowing sickly green with power. The armor was as tall as she was, and had massive gauntlets and boots that stuck out from the rest of the armor, the gauntlets with ten rings on each finger and thumb. The armor was marked with a light blue dragon in outline, two faces snarling at each other, cape whistling in an unnatural wind.

The Azar then spoke to them calmly:

**Well, gentlemen and lady, if you intend to begin this don't delay. I do have more important things to do with my time......**


	12. One Ring to Rule Them All:

The Martian Manhunter's eyes glowed red as he fired his eyebeams straight toward the Azar. Snarling as her fingers suddenly glowed with ten circular emanation points of light, the Azar became a blur that outmatched the beams, which seared into and then through a large portion of an Atlanta street and a blur which unleashed blows that sounded like thunderclaps that sent Wonder-Woman into the Air, threw the shielded Green Lantern aside with ease, and which clotheslined the Flash, flipping him head over heels, only the Green Lantern's shielding saving every bone in his body from breaking. The Azar then swept forward, aiming for the Manhunter but was targeted by Hugo Danner in a set of powerful haymakers. Each blow sounded like a gigantic boulder hitting a tin roof in turn but the Azar stood impassively as Danner continued to strike her, before sending him flying backward with a single push.

By then Wonder-Woman and the Manhunter were coming at her from both sides, to which she responded by seemingly creating a shield and a mace out of thin air. Wonder-Woman careened into the shield and then bounced backward, as though the shield were made of an odd rubbery substance, while the Manhunter was struck by the mace with sufficient force at the right angle to collide with Wonder-Woman in mid-air. Smiling, the Azar then turned to the Crimson Avenger and calmly walked toward him, only for the Green Lantern to send a set of powerful multi-faceted beams of explosive power into her shield. Turning toward him in displeasure, she exchanged seemingly in midair her thrown mace for an axe that was blocked by the effect of the Ring but with an explosive power that sent the Green Lantern flying further up into the air.

Then, as she again turned to the Crimson Avenger, Hugo Danner jumped toward her but with a single lightning-fast motion she gripped him by the throat. The Green Lantern reversed his course, unharmed, and began to send waves of power to constrict the Azar and to confine her in a prison even her strength should not be able to break. As the Azar calmly held Hugo Danner by the throat, the Green Lantern's power suddenly constricted her, Hugo Danner falling to the ground with a collision that left a small crater. The oversized gauntlets were forced to her side, though each finger and both thumbs suddenly began to glow in a circular fashion.

**Ten are the rings of Azar.**

Two eyes glowed beneath the hood, glowing not with anger but with a condescending contempt.

**Ten are the rings of Azar, and woe to the man who relies upon his willpower to counteract that of a being that can sustain hundreds of Universes and the will of all that is in them, from the lowliest sub-atomic particle to the grand superclusters of all galaxies. Willpower cannot withstand a God!**

Ten glowing strands of a sickly green energy began to crawl out of the prison-chamber that the Azar was sealed in, covering it in a spider-web of energy that seemed to pulse. Then the green energy shattered with a hissing sound and the Azar strode out unharmed, fingers glowing again where each of the Rings was visible.

Diana blinked.

So those are the Rings my mo-

As the word crossed her mind the Azar suddenly hovered over her, her oversized boots just above Diana's eyes.  
**  
What fools these heathens be.**

The boot drew back.......

 

and slammed into the face of the Martian Manhunter, passing through his intangible face, the Manhunter having transformed back from his shifting, the Azar was displeased but only momentarily. Landing amidst the JSA, she was not surprised to see Wonder-Woman, Danner, the Manhunter, the Flash, the Green Lantern, gathered around her while the Crimson Avenger successfully moved civilians out of the way. Shouting:

 

**I am the fire on the Earth, and here it is kindled!**

The Azar then lunged forward, a blur in motion, throwing aside the shielded Flash, smacking Danner head over heels, using her shield to block the Green Lantern's power-blasts, and then summoning again her mace to wade into a major battle between herself, Wonder-Woman, and the Martian Manhunter.  
**  
It is kindled, and the fat from your corpses shall be its feed.**

With that, the mace swung.

__________________________

_R_ a's _Industries Main Warehouse, outskirts of New York, that same day:_ 'Master Ghul,' the kneeling, gigantic man said, his olive skin pitted and covered in scars, a scraggly beard covering a weak chin.

"Yes, Ubu?" 

"We have a visitor. And I do not think he's friendly." 

"Oh?" 

"Yes, it's that young Ken El." 

"Ah. Well, what does he want?" 

"I think he wishes to know about the Lazarus Pits." 

"Well, he shall not find out about them, then. You have my permission to deal with Mr. El however it is necessary to do so, and I will find a means of disposing of the body."

As Ubu gave the orders, a great many men came out of the shadows, equipped with both tommy guns and experimental devices tacitly lifted from the Soviet Union, devices shaped like guns but glowing with an eerie energy. Mr. El, a tall and quiet man dressed in a double-breasted white suit said where both Ra's and Ubu could hear him over the radio: 

"I figured that a man who had a Bertron Pit would not exactly be willing to divulge it. But know this, whoever you are, the death of these men is on your head."

The men began to open fire, but Ken El stood quietly, letting them fire upon him and shred the suit. As the bullets bounced off of him harmlessly, and the lasers from the experimental weapons simply shredded the suit with no other effect, they were astonished to see a black and silver outfit, with an inverted pentagon on it, an S-like symbol prominently displayed, and a cape. Other than this, Ken El had no effects whatsoever, while the men's ammunition was all depleted. Two eyes suddenly glowed red, and a set of beams fired that melted guns and cut men in two, an arc of destruction that cut for about four minutes and then all was silent.

Ubu then looked at Ra's al Ghul. He said to Ubu "I think that this is when we cut our losses. Activate the bomb on the gas main beneath this building on my order." 

As both men headed to Ra's's automobile, they were astonished to see two booted feet hovering over them, feet connected to a black and silver outfit with a brilliant, bright silver cape, and that brilliant silver S-like symbol. The figure this outfit contained was quite muscular, and two eyes gazed forward red with menace.

"What are you, some kind of Superman?"   
_  
I am neither Super nor a Man. I am a son of the planet Krypton. You have something in which I have interest. I will find out what it is, or I will destroy your car, you will lose your base, you and your little man-servant will die, and I will be unharmed. Which, Mr. 'Demon's Head' will it be?_

Ubu dropped the explosive detonator at Ras' Al-Ghul's visual signal and said "Mr. El, is it?" 

Kem-L of the noble House of El, yes.

"You have my master's undivided attention." 

Kem-L landed, but witnessing with his X-ray vision that Ra's al-Ghul was drawing a scimitar, sighed. As Al-Ghul withdrew it, Kem-L's eyes blazed and two beams struck the scimitar, melting it and causing the molten metal to burn across the floor and both Al-Ghul and Ubu to jump backward.

_That was unwise._

Deciding to illustrate how unwise it was, Kem-L then told both men to get into their car and chose to move it just outside the blast range of the explosion, then melted the tires with his heat vision and melted the door handles inside and outside the car. Smiling, he then went to the warehouse, using X-ray vision to identify the bomb and his heat vision to activate it. The explosion disintegrated the building and left a gigantic pillar of smoke and fire rising into the sky. Walking out completely unharmed, not a hair out of place, not even a smidgen of soot on his outfit, was Kem-L, face marked by a rather sinister grin. In a blur he was outside the car, and yanked half of it out of place with a light tug on it.

_Now, about this Lazarus Pit, as you call it?_  
  
___________________

Outside Chicago: 

The ground began to crack as the Rings of Azar blazed with the monster's power. Again the massive, mutated form of Cyrus Gold transformed into the Zombie Solomon Grundy arose from the ground.

**Grundy Crush Puny Humans!**

  
The shout echoed into the night as Grundy leaped eastward, crossing Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio in a single bound, descending and leaping again, landing just outside the Five Boroughs, where an already-shaken Ra's Al-Ghul and Ubu now saw the zombie facing the man in the black and silver uniform. Deciding to take a chance they leaped out of the car and called in a favvor from the US government, letting them know that one of the men who'd wrecked London was all too active. As this went out, a homeless man nudged another, much larger homeless man.

 

_Non._

Non awoke and simply murmured Rrr?   
_  
Kem-L is just a few miles from where we are. We have the chance to surprise him. Let's do so._

As the bestial mouth of Grundy roared: 

**Grundy Crush Puny Humans!**

Kem-L, looking bored, walked right over to Grundy and used his heat vision to cut Grundy into four pieces and then used his heat vision further to melt each individual piece to ashes and his super-breath to literally blow Grundy away.

As he prepared to find Al-Ghul and Ubu, he then saw two men hovering in the air. One, thinner but muscular, wearing a goatee and his eyes glowing red. The other, immensely tall and well-proportioned, making a constant Rrrrrrr sound.  
_  
Excellent, gentlemen. Let's begin this again._

With that, Kem-L's eyes glowed as heat vision surged toward Zod and Non, who launched themselves toward him at super-speed........


	13. Second Contact:

_Kandor, Krypton: Chambers of the Science Council._

The one hundred and forty-four members of the Science Council glowered angrily at Jor-El, Lara Lor-Van, and Zor-El as they all knelt before them.

"Because of your mistakes, Jor-El, Earth now stands not merely on the brink of a war among its primitive masses, but poised on the brink of a conquest. In another setting the Martian would be able to do our work for us, but now there is another factor here also."

The speaker, the tall and well-built Lor-Van, then depressed the sunstone. An image appeared of the Justice Society engaging a woman, blonde and blue-eyed, garbed in the sinister armor of the Azar of Azarath. The woman had a shield and a mace and was moving into a battle too fast for eyes to see, tossing people as though they were nothing.

"The sinister monster from beyond is now here also. This Azar will burn this planet if we do not provide at least a solution to some of these primitives' problems." 

Jor-El, head marked by a spit-curl, looked straight at the Council.

"By all that I have seen the Azar is invincible to anything in this universe. Promethium has not had any effect on it, and I am also willing upon the conclusion of this matter to discuss a reported encounter between this thing's "Azarath" and Apokilips. And to discuss what we could do if it came to Krypton as it did to Earth. But that is not the important matter now." 

Lor-Van looked straight at Jor-El. "No, it is not, son of Seyg-El. What is important is that three of our race stand poised on the brink of inaugurating strange aeons in this planet. Dru-Zod and Non Ek may wish, as you put it, to return here, but your ancestor Kem-L wishes the conquest of that planet."

It was then that Lara Lor-Van spoke up: "Members of the Science Council, we know now that Kem-L's theories were correct. Exposed to certain wavelengths of radiation, we gain immense power. We are in a sense Gods in a true sense in those worlds. We can withstand the destructive force in an explosion of a planet unharmed. The strength we have seen them display at its greatest levels can move gas giants. Our speed can outpace the weight of a singularity. And the beams from our eyes can see atoms tens of thousands of _Akrin_ away, individual atoms. As well as light up the stars themselves. Yes, our strength outpaces that of the Gods of our own mythological tales. Our endurance and our speed makes us into beings of power of a most terrifying level. If they see us, then they can and they will fear us provided that power walks with an unveiled rod of iron to dash what it will into shreds."

The Council then turned to Lara. "Daughter, what then do you suggest?" 

She looked to Jor-El.

"Council Head Lor-Van, I offer you an alternative. We can and we will go down to this world, and show them that the power at our disposal is not merely that of fear, but that of aid. They will look into the sky not in fear but in delight. In time, we may even send others of our world to aid them. They may stumble and fall, the moreso after the first encounters with us. But in time, they can join us in the sun. And in time, they will achieve wonders." 

"And who are you suggesting I send?" 

"I suggest that you send your daughter, my brother, and I. The Phantom Zone was something we all created, and we owe it to this planet to not have it cursed with our own wars. We will not intervene in their local, domestic struggles. To do so at present would make us only different from Kem-L in aim, not in method. We cannot aid them to join us as we are under their stars by being their overlords. But we can show them first that with great power can come great responsibility, not only great arrogance and wrath."

Lor-Van was silent, and the room was covered in a smothering stilllness for a space of a quarter-hour that seemed an eternity.

"Very well. You will take the starship _Radiance_ and you will go to Earth. There you are assigned the following tasks: first, convince the Earthmen to let you aid them. As you said, we cannot fight Kem-L by imitating his methods. Second, you will re-imprison them in the Zone, this time properly. You are permitted to take with you spaceflight outfits suited to your family. And Lara," 

She looked up. "Yes, father?" 

"You, too, shall wear the symbol of the House of El. As this is a mission of hope and of deliverance, the outfit that you are all going to wear has a cape of red, boots of red, trunks of red, a central body that's blue, and a red symbol of the House of El in yellow, the color of hope. You shall also go with the fate of two worlds riding on you. If you succeed, Jor-El, we shall also discuss with you these doomsday theories of yours."

Jor-El nodded, hoping that his elation at this did not pass through his face. As he turned to Lara, she turned her to Zor-El, who nodded. As they went to the starship and began to activate it, Jor-El took out the scouting outfit.

"I hope," he said as he held it up in a meditative fashion, "that one day people will see this outfit not as representative of Zod's small-minded thuggishness, but as that of Men of Tomorrow. Do you know that Kryptonians and the primitives of this world look alike enough that one of us could pass among them anonymously? Our scientists predicted that evolution would produce more aliens that looked very different from us. Then we discover the Martians, Azarath, Apokilips, all alien dimensions where you could not distinguish them from us any too greatly. If the rumors of Tamaran are accurate, there too are more aliens that look mostly like us.

Why is that?" 

Zor-El snorted. "Jor, reality does what it wants to do, not what we want it to do. It always has and it always will." 

Jor-El then smiled. He said "Well, I figure I should tell you this. The ship has an environment that will simulate the environment under the radiation of a yellow Sun. It will take us three days to cross the space between Krypton and Earth primarily so that we can use that time to adjust to that new environment *before* we arrive. We have much to do. Let's begin." 

Jor-El then put the outfit back within its container, and went to the bridge, where he strapped himself in along with Zor-El and Lara. As they all followed the sequence, they began to feel the rushing force of the engines beginning. Jor-El then calibrated their engine to take them across the stars, and a brilliant light engulfed the ship, which vanished.


	14. A Pillar of Fire By Night

 

 

 

 

The mace swung forward only to pass harmlessly through J'onn J'onnzz's arm, as the Martian then stared at the Azar, eyes glowing red. Snarling at him, the Azar then screamed for the first time in the fight in genuine pain when the heat vision boiled her eye, which proceeded to erupt in an explosion of ichor that took with it a good-sized portion of the right side of her face. Even as the injury began to restore itself, the Azar turned to the Manhunter, eyes now glowing with a terrible light that burned with starlike intensity and heat. The ground began to melt in her vicinity, while some of the civilians nearby screamed as the horrifying heat began to turn everything left in its path to ash. The Azar then spoke in a calm voice that was the more frightening for its softness: 

**You hurt me.**

Opening her mouth, the Azar, even as flesh and bone regenerated themselves back together, sounded the Trombone of Death. For sixty seconds an immense foghorn-like reverberating psychic attack seared into and then through the nerves and bones and muscles of the League, producing a set of seizures. The starlike heat had by now seared a good portion of the rubble and those civilians who had not yet fled into piles of ash, and had begun to affect Diana's body of clay as an oven, searing it into place. Recognizing this, she threw the sword of Hephaestus, called into her hands by a telepathic prayer to the God, which again aimed at the Azar's eye. A sword that could slice through atom struck the Azar's healing eye and bounced off harmlessly, but served to negate the heat as the Azar's eyes seemed to restore their prior condition. Calling upon Zeus for aid, Diana barely managed to break the heat that had transformed the lower parts of her legs and her left arm into a fine substance like that of the most glorious china and restored herself to normal when the Azar's eyes blazed again.

Smiling, the Azar then flew up in the sky, hovering outside the immediate range of the JSA, which lay before her twitching still, some of them moaning from the terrible burns inflicted by the heat upon them. The Azar then moved both her hands out from her side, palms down, fingers splayed in the massive, seemingly ludicrously oversized garments. The blue dragon on that armor was now glowing with a strangely beautiful light, as the Azar then roared in a voice that seemed to echo with the power of countless star in countless universes, a roar that struck the mind as well as the body, opening visions of infinite planets covered in ivory and gold, barbed chains digging deep into the flesh of the screaming masses and a figure upon an immense throne clad in light blue, eyes glowing with a terrible light.

The roar flattened all of Atlanta, and produced a rolling wave of destruction that rolled to Savannah in the south and Toronto in the north, smashing glass, toppling buildings built on unsteady foundations, detonating cars and what planes were in the air at the time. People reported the same visions across a good-sized portion of the United States and Ontario: a brilliant glimpse of a vast and otherworldly realm that then led to awareness of barbed chains that surrounded them, and a figure clad in brilliant light blue robes whose eyes glowed with a foul and unholy light.

When the roar subsided, the Azar descended in serenity before the dust-covered, still-conscious members of the Justice Society. Looking at the badly burned body of the Crimson Avenger, she then smiled before deciding to grant the one normal of the ones who had had the courage to fight even if he had not done much a degree of healing. It would not do to have her foes die too soon, as her goal was yet to be fulfilled.

___________________________

**At the New York Lazarus Pit:** Thus was it that the Kryptonians, in the midst of a duel of one ancient Kryptonian with the massively powerful but otherwise unsteady force of Non and the skilled, capable blows of Zod were struck by a rolling wave of power that blindsided them all. Each of them fell over, seizures gripping them, and it was purely by the benefit of the yellow Sun that their internal organs were not pulped by the shock of such a sound with extraordinarily keen hearing. After Zod and Non awoke, Kem-L had vanished, but Zod himself had a face deeply troubled. What he had suspected from the rumors surrounding Yolanda Azania and that voice he had heard twice was true: the fiendish Zazhalanzanai was on Earth in great wrath, and it seemed now that in addition to the power of Kem-L there was the menace of a God descended to this Earth to work its own will........

_______________________________

**Hyperspace:** Jor-El, Lara Lor-Van, and Zor-El were likewise shaken by the display of power, though its effects in space were limited by the bizarre tendencies of reality in hyperspace. Instead of the seizures, they simply beheld a vision of Krypton exploding, the day after a monster in dark green armor with a brilliant blue dragon that glowed with an unholy light appeared, raising a sceptre and speaking words in a foul and unholy tongue before slamming the staff into the ground, before flying off, battering aside the efforts of the Kryptonian military to shoot her down by simply flying in an arc that took her straight through all the ships and disappearing into the heavens.

Then they saw a figure that seemed to appear within their ship, tall and otherworldly. Clad in armor that was a dark grey, this figure wore a cape of a different shade of light blue, with a pallor and facial structure that bore an eerie resemblance to Death of the Endless, though in this case the figure had nine eyes of gold that shone brilliantly. The illusions seemed to be dispelled and a sense of peace and determination restored itself.

__________________________

**Dunwich, Massachusetts, evening of 9 April:** In a derelict town that had been abandoned since what was officially labeled an explosion of natural gas in the region, a brilliant light began to cover the night sky. The light turned night into day, for a time, and then coalesced into one person. Tall and clad in grey armor, with a light blue cloak, the chalky-skinned nine-eyed figure of Deborah bat Omri smiled. How appropriate, it seemed, for her father to will her to appear directly first in a town affected by the Old Ones. None, after all, after that little display of hubris on the part of her older sister would dare turn to the abandoned and derelict husk of this city to look for a new Cosmic force.

Deborah smiled, and then summoned her favorite small arms from Hammerspace, checking both the quantity of ammunition, that her clips of ammunition were set properly, and then placed them on her back, while adding as well her two favorite melee weapons. Then she sobered. She had hoped the one warning would deter Zezhelanzunui and remind her that she was under the observation of the Universal Empire. Then she had destroyed an entire town of over 300,000 people and slain over 1,000,000 people in one rapid display of her full power that had finally drawn the Universal Empire into the fray.

Upon watching the Kryptonians and learning of the dispatch of the two members of the House of El and the one of the House of Van, she decided to let the Kryptonians handle their problem. The dispute between the Lightdancer and the Azar, that was both personal and business. Stepping forward, Deborah faded into thin air, leaving behind her a sense of cleansing power that left Dunwich still derelict and abandoned, but the restless spirits of the Dead slain by the Horror which lurked behind a natural gas explosion for the first time at peace.


	15. A Bright Cold Day in April

As Deborah faded from Dunwich, she calmly assumed her glamour, which was about three feet shorter than she was, lacked the extra eyes, and wore the head-veil and long dresses of an Orthodox Jewish woman. Smiling, she then walked through a portal. A time of reckoning was to begin, at which point this world would face the removal of the darkness that threatened it. Kem-L, now seated in his office, the yellow-sun lamp healing the damage done to his ears, detected the arrival of energies somewhat similar to those of the Azar but very different. Smiling at the chance to at least discover the nature of this new force, Kem-L then swiftly disappeared, his pains forgotten in the desire for a new glory.

Deborah faded into the city of New York in an alleyway, stepping over the unconscious alcoholic who fell on his face in the filth and detritus of the alley. Turning back to him, Deborah decided to send a wave of hope through him that would lead to the launching of what would become the Suicide Slum Development Association. Smiling, she strode forward. Her senses warned her of a pursuit from above, and deciding to lure the Kryptonian away from metropolitan New York, she walked through a portal and emerged in the dense forests of northern Canada. As predicted, a few seconds later the Kryptonian followed her. He stood hovering over her, his feet two feet above her head. Two eyes burned like embers in the twilight, the light through the trees casting a set of eerie shadows where both stood. The glamour fell and the six-foot tall Deborah was replaced by her in her full height, blue cloak still against her body. The Kryptonian did not miss a beat, his heat vision surging out in two blasts of energy that sliced into the ground just as his face was struck by the butt of a gun which sent him head over heels, the heat vision striking up into the sky and then down into the earth, until it was muffled by the impact of his face.

Deborah then smiled, her fang-like teeth prominent, and used her modified shotgun to fire five quick rounds into Kem-L. The cumulative impact led to him being shot from the Yukon to the northernmost edges of the Soviet Union, just outside Murmansk. Coughing and wheezing, Kem-L then stared at Deborah, who'd followed him easily enough. Picking him up, Deborah spoke to him curtly:   
**  
I'll not be followed by some upstart from another world who thinks that by virtue of being the biggest fish in a small pond he is free to do what he will to anyone he should will. Seek to follow me again, and I will do to you what I wish to do, orders or no orders.**

It was then that a sudden thunderous punch caused his world to go black for a time following a sickening crunch and a sound not unlike that of an armored fist striking into flesh and blood. Kem-L woke up, shocked, using his reading of Earth geography to realize that one punch had sent him clear from the outskirts of Soviet Murmansk to the interior of Antarctica. Coughing, he began to levitate up to the Sun, knowing its rays would heal him. In hindsight, he realized that the next time he sought to war against these beings from another world they might well kill him. That prospect, given the godlike power at his disposal disturbed him more than anything else had since he'd arrived.

In New York City, the re-clothed Yolanda Azania, who had enjoyed with confidence the empowering of the Justice Society and the full Soviet confirmation of their Metallo Project and its great power in the wake of her mass-murderous onslaught in the United States, felt the power of Deborah upon its arrival and in the brief clash with Kem-L. She frowned. This would complicate matters immensely. 


	16. I teach you the Overman

11 April 1939: 

As the clocks chimed fourteen, Yolanda Azania turned to the crowd. Clad in a strange dress which seemed made of otherworldly material that alternately glowed or glimmered in the sunlight, blue eyes seeming to glow with an unholy light. The dress was a light blue and seemed to ripple and change patterns with the sentences spoken. Azania was inhumanly tall, towering over the tallest men in the audience, her voice with intonations that no human voice could create. It boomed out in the shaken, disoriented citadel of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist movement: 

_Lo, I speak to you of a Fire that shall descend from heaven in power and in majesty, a fire greater than eye can see and that mind can comprehend. Heed not the demands of the vagrant, for it is written that the foolish shall fall when a child rules them. Yea, now, now I say to you that you have fallen into the hands of one who while a man in physical and chronological time is but an overgrown spoiled child. Never has your leader suffered in his life, and now he shall lead you to suffering where fire shall fall from Heaven and cities be burned to ashes. From pride and power and prestige your cities shall become charred ashes, the rubble of an unholy realm of death fallen in upon itself. From the glory of conquest you shall awaken to sunny skies and empty cities, blackness that consumes all that you sought to create._

_Now, now I say to you woe to the inhabitants of the Empire of the Spear-Men. for you have invoked a devil who is come above you in great wrath, for he feels his time is short. Yea, you speak in falseness of peace and safety, and then shall awaken to find a beat with claws and fangs of iron destroying you. The monster you have summoned is human as you are, but he shall lead you down the path that though it seem sweet shall promise only death. The dead travel fast, but their journey is short and from them all knowledge of the land of the living is lost. Heed no demon of your imagination, cast out the Hut-Dweller and all his creations!_

  
As Yolanda Azania spoke, the crowds became nervous. Azania, hand raised, then smiled and continued her harangue:

 

_Woe to them who promise peace and safety and desire to bring war and devastation. You shall bring against you locusts from the East and fire from the West, for you forsake the traditions of your ancestors stern and cruel that brought you gruel in peasant hovels for prestige and pride that shall bring you rubble and fate left in the hands of others greater and wiser than you. Fear the Leader and his falsehoods, lest you indeed awaken to sunny cities that you shall not recognize as from a dream and then hold in your hands the skull of your husband or your wife or your father or your mother!_

The growling of  an engine intruded on her senses, and Azania turned. Smiling calmly, she saw a full brigade of heavily armed Army troops and an equally large brigade of Security-Staff Death's Head troopers. They then raised guns simultaneously, the Army and SS forming into a semi-circle around her.

"Surrender pig-dog!"

Azania then looked at them with a skeptical eye and the crowd, already thinning suddenly paused.

_What right have you to command me?_

"In the name of our beloved Leader and Empire-Chancellor Adolf Hitler, surrender or you will be shot. First, last, and only warning!"

Azania then glowed brightly and the brilliantly-sheened robe was replaced by a suit of greenish battle-armor emblazoned with a blue dragon. The battle armor had oversized gauntlets and boots, the face partially shielded by a mouth-guard. The eyes remained blue and the top of her head exposed, but her eyes were now iron-hard. Her eyes even seemed windows into a strange and otherworldly environment. As the Ultra-Humanite confirmed her presence in Berlin, he then dispatched Captain Nazi and Vandal Savage to accompany him. They could not move fast enough if they were to spare Nuremberg the fate that had so recently visited a large portion of North America......

_________________________________

Nuremberg,  six minutes after the clocks chimed fourteen.

The Azar smiled as the guards looked upon her, confusion leading some of them to drop their weapons, others to clench theirs the more tightly. The order: "Fire!" was given and bullets surged toward her, many missing her entirely but the ones that did hit bounced off and led to some soldiers and SS men yowling in pain as they fell, bullets punching into them. In contempt the Azar then lifted herself into the air, hovering straight to the soldiers with pleasure.

**You call yourself a master race but you're all a bunch of maggots mewling about as you're exposed to the cold light of reason which destroys all prejudice in the iron hand of reality. Whether you call yourself Comrade or master born to rule the world booted and spurred, you are still a maggot raising a hand to a being far greater and wiser in my youth than such vermin as you. You seek to make slaves of others, and now you meet a true master born booted and spurred to whom the pure-blood masses of mankind are but apes that talk.**

The Azar then unleashed the same power that had surged in Atlanta. The soldiers and SS men were stunned as they beheld an otherworldly realm that seemed immensely vast and beautiful. Galactic superclusters merged into gigantic tapestries of vast and unimaginably remote size, before merging into glowing worlds of ivory, gold, jasper, and carnelian. Streets of gold with lamp-posts of diamond and lamps of amethyst. Rapt at the glimpse of what seemed a new Jerusalem, their vision narrowed still further to the immense Citadel of the Temple Azarath, the focal point of the vast entity that they had caught a glimpse of. A throne now stood before them and upon it was seated with a ferocious and inhumanly wide grin a figure clad in the same robes that had just given the harangue. Looking into the face of the being they knew as Yolanda Azania, even as the figure hovering before them in armor saw ten rings glowing on her gauntlets. The rings glowed and the Azar spoke again: 

**Ten are the Rings of the Azar!**

Light surged out consuming all that was within it, throwing off the accuracy of the Ultra-Humanite's teleportation device which dumped them just outside of Nuremberg. The city was consumed in what looked like an unholy firestorm, a column of light that reached unto Heaven, reducing everything within it to blackened rubble that was ever more finely pulverized. As the firestorm rage, a figure floated out from it unscathed. Hovering in pleasure, the figure was clad in green armor like that of a Medieval Hochfeldzugmeister of the Teutonic Knights, blonde and blue-eyed. Her face seemed human but gave an impression of some Satanic deformity though none of the men could fully explain the impression. Hovering well above them, the figure had on its gauntlets ten glowing rings of light, while the dragon-like symbol on its armor seemed to be moving and gnashing at itself, though this the men dismissed as merely a flight of fancy.

Angered at the consuming fire that continued to work in Nuremberg, Captain Nazi impusively took flight and swung his fist toward the inhuman-seeming but human-appearing face, roaring in anger. His fist hit the woman right between the eyes and then as he felt pain for the first time since his transformation, Captain Nazi howled. The Azar then smacked him with the back of her hand, throwing him down and descended before the Ultra-Humanite and Vandal Savage with a contemptuous smile, as the all-consuming flame faded and from Nuremberg arose a reek and a smoke that seemed to darken the very day itself.

As she landed gracefully, the tall and inhuman Azar looked at Captain Nazi, who was starting to get to his feet, the Ultra-Humanite, who was busy calling to himself a weapon she looked rather forward to destroying, and then with a skeptical eye raised to Vandal Savage before speaking to them with a voice that carried an inhuman clash of thunder and a deceptive softness:  
 **  
Well, gentlemen, let's not be all day about it.**


	17. The Overman is that Madness, She is that Frenzy

Captain Nazi lunged at the Azar, who snorted contemptuously and simply braced herself, gauntleted hands on her hips. Captain Nazi collided with her and then fell into the ground, the impact shaking his bones and leading him to whimper from the pain. With a sudden swift movement the Azar reached down and picked him up by his collar, asking with a cruel, cynical smile:   
 ****  
Is that all you got, ape?  
  
Captain Nazi then moved as swift as it was in him to do and kicked her in the face, yelping when the impact stung his foot and left her unaffected.

**I thought so.**

The Azar's rings then glowed as she hurled the Captain into his two confreres, then hovered in the air before them. Smiling, she then spoke again:   
 **  
A master race you call yourselves. Yet in truth even by the debased standards of this race of apes and maggots you are but children who have discovered their father's gun armed and prepared to fire and gaze right into the barrel, hands on the trigger. The future you seek to build is one where you say 'Eat,  drink, and be merry, tomorrow our enemies die' and yet in a few years your cities will indeed be sunnier than ever you remembered. Gods walk among mortals now, not children appointed to lead men, not the criminals and petty vermin of yesterday's civilization made the new-found statesmen and iron-mongers of the present.**

The Azar's eyes glowed a brilliant blue, the bright light obscuring parts of her face as she continued:   
 **  
The only thing you have mastered is the art of making fine uniforms. Like debased savages you yield to our own avarice, to your own lust, to your own quest to spill blood for blood, life for life, a mouthful of teeth for one tooth. Like curs and mongrels you yield to nothing but your own base and cruel instincts, expecting that the hand of the vagrant you have entrusted in power shall guide you. You are all of you lost little maggots who need an iron hand to control and to dominate and to master you. The fire of judgment is upon you, a day of darkness, of gloom, of fear and trembling. Horsemen ride too and fro slaughtering what they will. Four riders move into the Valley of Decision, where multitudes shall gather.**

**By fire and sword I shall judge you. Cities shall burn, and in the midst of choking smoke covering rubble, you shall hold the corpses of your loved ones and cry out to an uncaring sky, knowing that God walks among you and that my power is unlimited. I am a God, and you are but bacteria and filth that cling to one's flesh, easily gained, easily removed. I know all things, I see all things, before me all things answer. I am the one who was, who is, and who yet is to be. Indeed, truly truly I say to you, before your objects of desire were.....     !אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה**

Raising a dark green hand in gauntleted armor with five rings glowing brilliantly, face hidden by a brilliant light that withered with heat and pierced with a deadly chill within the very souls of them who gazed into it, she spoke again in thunder and doom:   
 **  
So is it that the foolish scions of the so-called Master Race stand before a God in the flesh, a being that is before you as an engineer is before a bacterium that slithers and crawls in a drop of water.  
**  
As the Azar gazed into the eyes of her audience, sensing their trembling and preparing to call upon her full power to scour the entire continent of Europe of life, the sound of five gunshots split the air, blasting her backward head over heels. Landing in the dirt, coughing and wheezing, the Azar looked into nine golden eyes in a chalky white face, thin lips parted in a fanged smile. 

**You talk too much.**

The Azar's eyes looked into Deborah's nine and her mouth opened, a deep rumbling growl that caused everyone in a four hundred mile radius bar Deborah to clutch their ears, moaning, following. The Azar's face was marked by a bestial snarl, the skin seeming less human by the second, an illusion of a mountainous draconic being with two fanged heads snarling seeming to appear, before more gunshots broke it and sent the Azar flying back further.

The Azar this time landed on her feet, summoning a shield and her favorite melee weapon, the gigantic maul she sometimes named Bonebreaker. The shield, emblazoned with the language of Azarath gleamed in the artificial light of the Azar's magic as the Azar spoke:

**Guns are a coward's weapon.**

Deborah only smiled and then fired one last shot that shattered the shield and led the Azar to drop the warhammer, which disappeared into thin air, clutching a bleeding arm. The Azar then flew straight for Deborah, who sighed and said:

**As I said, you talk too much.**

As the Azar launched herself toward her, Deborah fired again, the shot propelling the Azar back and moved with a swift and terrible motion of her own, slamming the butt of the gun into the Azar's face with a thunderous impact that jarred the Azar's teeth and made the creature roar in pain, eyes glowing again and rings shining with a brilliant and terrible light.


	18. If Cain Be Avenged Sevenfold

**I did not want to do this, not here. Not over rubble that would merely be more finely pulverized. There is no point to making a Char the worse scarred.**

The Azar drew back and a strangeness seemed to shimmer around her. The very fabric of reality groaned, seismographs the world over marking the moment. Physically she did not seem to grow any larger, but her voice now rumbled with the sound of one who commanded from atoms to superclusters:

**That decision has passed.**

The Azar hurled herself at Deborah again with a blinding speed, blood gone and all traces of her wounds disappeared, before Deborah ducked under her onrushing form and then raised herself up, smashing into the Azar's form with her shoulder and forcing the monster to land on its face, the impact registered on seismographs across the world. Ten stars burned from the Azar's gauntlets now, eyes glowed with an unholy and sickly light. The monster then moved with a blindiing speed, the impact seeming to have utterly unfazed it. And it was an it, not a she, now. The rushing movement was imperceptible to human eyes but from the Rhine to Vladivostok, from Lappland to the Deccan, a strange and eerie feeling came across humanity. Not fear, not awe, but something in between that caused trembling and nausea that were powerful and yet uncaused.

This time the Azar connected with Deborah with a physical blow that was again registered across the world's seismographs. The impact left a tremendous crater around Deborah, a crater some 100 meters deep, and a gigantic column of smoke and dust. Yet from that column, Deborah's voice flashed, the last word a crackling accusation that seemed to transcend time and space and hinted of higher spheres:   
**  
Do not mistake my calmness for anything less than a desire to end this without damaging this world irrevocably, _sister._.....**

Another tremendous blow followed, and the crater seemed to form an ugly scab-like thing, now deeper and stranger in shape, and the Azar was hurled right out of the smoke, Deborah hovering in the air and following her trajectory, before throwing another punch that was far stronger than the first. The hypersonic impact created an atmospheric shock effect, reality groaning again as Deborah's punch threw the Azar to the ground. This time the monster fell with a thunderous impact that flattened a significant portion of Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, and the mountains that ringed the Reichsgaue of Bohemia and Moravia.

Nine stars flashed and an enormous column of light appeared as Deborah began to speak in a strange tongue, the otherworldly language causing a strange mixture of awe and fright and the light-column focused on New York, where a strange object with geometries unlike those of Earth, neither spherical nor conical but somewhere in between, of ivory and gold shimmered and fractured, scattered in imperceptible depths across void-winds in countless universes, rendered harmless. This done, Deborah called from the Deeps of Time, and Vincent Smith joined her.

**She will not depart, not now. She searches for something. Why she simply searches for it instead of reaching root and branch down and hollowing out the souls of them who have it, I know not. But we must be prepared to move when she moves, lest this planet become another Azarath-outpost, where people will be immortal, freed of want, of fear, of suffering, of sorrow, of misery, of death, with the strength of ten thousand men and the speed of the cheetah and the gazelle, longing forever for death but afraid to die.**

Vincent then asked her:

"What about the Kryptonians. Shouldn't we do something about them?" 

Deborah looked at him.   
**  
We work for Cosmic purposes, not those of mortals.**

Vincent then blinked with his one remaining human eye and held her by her shoulders, looking into her eyes: 

"I'm from another variant of the United States. Even if I have become this.....Cosmic....being, I want to aid my own homeland in its various forms. The Kryptonians will tear it apart if left to themselves, these are those strange ones that invariably seem to be evil except for that one guy." 

Deborah cocked her head.

**You mean that these..........beings......would represent, so to speak, a potential attempt to change and/or forestall the origin of the Star-Child? Then that has potential to be considered a side mission of acceptable worth. Cosmic keystones cannot be altered.  
**  
Deborah's inhumanly wide mouth broke out into a fanged grin that reached literally from ear to ear.

**  
Then let us go to the United States. If my sister adopts the idea of the Prophetess, perhaps she should not be given a monopoly on seeking to emulate the ways of our ancestors in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah........**

The two vanished seemingly into thin air.

The Azar remained unconscious in the ruins of Munich, even as the agents of Herr Hitler's Third Reich managed, with extreme difficulty, to lift up her unconscious body and to place it in a truck that was to take a special trip to Berlin. The Ultra-Humanite had special plans for this God that fell from the stars, plans that might permit the Nazis to outmatch the growing danger of the Metallo Corps......


	19. Long Live Solomon Grundy

When the plane took off from the ruins of Munich, the Azar knew that she had been 'captured' by the maggots of humankind, these dregs of criminality and hooliganism, these poltroons who proclaimed themselves masters even as they were most incapable of mastering themselves. Keeping her eyes silent, body frozen, the monster cast herself into her Empire, using Second-Sight to witness the strange sites. These poltroons in black and brown outfits were talking of someone called an 'Ultra-Humanite,' a name that made her nostrils flare in her own flesh from contempt. Ultra or not, he was merely human and his facilities would pay the price for this arrogance. The soldiers kept sneaking glances at her from the fear that she would turn upon them and slay all of them, but as she remained seemingly asleep, their fear seemed to slowly vanish. One man, with a smirk, even held a knife right to her lips and said, "I want to make it so this bitch smiles when she's in the Fuhrer's capital!" The knife, however, when put to her lips splintered and he yelped as the shrapnel tore into his flesh and seemed to disintegrate in sickly glows on her own.

The man's superior officer slapped him hard on the back of the head. "Sie Scheisskopfen! This woman cannot be harmed by conventional means!" Holding his bleeding hand, the man went back to being seated. In seemingly no time at all, they were in Berlin and she was taken down the Unter den Linden, to the secret facilities of  the Ultra-Humanite. Expecting that this man, a theoretically *genuine* superman of the poltroon-state would have a flamboyant lair, the Azar was actually surprised to see the outer levels looked like a run-down fishmonger's hut.

"The Ultra-Humanite believes that concealment is worth its weight in gold." As they entered the run-down hut, it turned out that instead this strangely-situated building in the center of Berlin concealed an interior vastly exceeding the scale of the exterior in size and depth. A strange man, bald and smiling appeared.

"So this is the thing that ravaged so many of our cit-" the Azar's eyes flashed open and she rose from the bed she had been strapped into before transportation, snapping straps of experimental promethium alloys with contemptuous ease. The monster levitated into the air, her gauntlets glowing with ten suns that led most of the crowd to scream, falling their knees and covering their eyes. The Azar then looked at the Ultra-Humanite and with a profound and contemptuous snort, spat right in front of his feet with such force that the building shook, before landing and resuming the form of Yolanda Azania.

Smiling as she confronted a hastily-dispatched force of RSHA agents, the monster began to blur and in a short time one hundred RSHA agents with the most powerful anti-metahuman firepower known at the time were a grotesque testament to modern art, the crimson splatters forming a pattern vaguely reminiscent of an octagon and a skull. Azania left the fish-monger's hut, only to see ten Mk. I tanks rolling down toward her. The clattering metal monsters looked ridiculous, with two tiny guns extending from their turrets as they continued to roll down the Unter den Linden and the Azar, not bothering to dignify these weapons with armor, blurred again as her hands began to glow. Inside a quarter of a second, the tanks were on fire, shrapnel pocketing buildings, the troops' soundless screams swallowed in explosions.

The monster smiled, face looking vaguely not so human after all, before the creature ascended into the sky. Then, with malice aforethought, the creature turned east. It would be a pleasure to humble the great and dreadful revolutionaries to the east even as the so-called Master Race had seen its cities leveled and its finest scientists and weapons pulverized. As she arrived, she soon saw aircraft buzzing her. Three fighters. Abruptly standing upright in midair, she cocked her head, gazing at the planes, and then sounded the trombone of death, and the planes fell. Blue eyes glowed with a sickly green light and the skies laughed........

________________________________________________

Washington, D.C., in the wake of the rampage of the monster from the stars, was a quieter, and a more terrified place. The arrival of three aliens from another planet, however, offered hope. These aliens, using what they termed a "Universal Translator," introduced themselves as "Jor-El, Zor-El, and Lara Lor-Van. We are from the planet Krypton, which orbits the red dwarf Rao." 

The sight of Jor-El and Zor-El wearing an outfit later to become one of the most famous outfits in the world, was astonishing. A blue body-suit with red circus-strongman trunks and red boots made up the bulk of the outfit. A yellow pentagon facing downward with a red S, and a red cape. it was a simple and symbolic outfit, one of hope. Lara Lor-Van wore a similar outfit, hers including a skirt and tights beneath the skirt. Hers, too, was marked with the S-symbol.

"We come here not to wage war, but to forestall one. Three criminals from our planet have escaped to yours, and have done great harm here. We wish to take them back to Krypton, that they may face justice on our world."

The Congressman from Montana spoke up: "Why should we trust you?" 

Jor-El looked at him, "We swear to obey all laws that you have implemented, with only one condition: we shall not neglect the dignity of any person of your planet, nor shall we allow our own desires to mean that we indulge ourselves in deciding who on your planet has rights, and who on your planet shall not have them." 

A Congressman from Alabama rose to his feet: "You mean to tell me that if some buck n-"

Jor-El turned to him: "Any means any. No exceptions."

The Congressman sat down, abashed.

"You have our word that once we have extracted these three criminals, we shall leave your planet, and that we intend no hostile actions to you, or to any like you."

The motion would be called a few hours later, and it was approved. Under the Keene Act, vigilantism would be legal, and extraterrestrial actions in pursuit of their own laws valid as well. The voting was close, by a two-vote margin, but the bill passed. None could forget the result of the overpowering wave of destruction that had wrecked so many of the best industrial regions of the United States, and none wished to. The rumors of the monster running around in Germany only furthered this conviction.

___________________________________________________

New York was a quiet place in the wake of the Keene Act. People moved quietly, not wishing to discover that their neighbors were secretly some monstrous creature from the stars to whom mountains were as dust clods and the skies an infinite tablet on which to scrawl new and unlimited designs. Two new faces appeared in the crowds. One, six feet four inches, was a light-skinned black woman in bell-bottom jeans. Her eyes concealed both wisdom and power that had built over centuries. The other, over seven feet tall and wearing a light blue suit, was powerfully built and intimidated away any who might have wished them harm.

Deborah, calmly, walked in New York, spreading with her every movement hope and peace and understanding. As she did so, she saw an immensely fast-moving white hulk descending from the skies. It was akin to a deformed monstrosity of a man taken from the Grave, given the power to long for death and forever be unable to die. Nodding to Vincent, who quietly removed his suit jacket and then watched as his skin changed to a technorganic metal, his height growing two feet and bulk in proportion, one eye transforming to a glowing metallic red, Deborah herself grew two feet in height and her skin changed to an inhuman chalky color, nine eyes of gold gleaming, her own outfit transformed into a suit of plate armor emblazoned with the symbol of the Universal Empire.

The white hulk landed and boomed:   
 **  
Solomon Grundy born on a Monday!**

The crowd tensed, in fear that more destruction was on the verge of occurring, as Vincent's arms changed to resemble the turrets of artillery pieces and a strange energy built up, glowing, and Deborah blurred into seemingly disappearing, hand brandishing a strange kind of bladed weapon, launching herself at the monstrous Undead .......


	20. Endless Endings

Deborah collided into Solomon Grundy with a sound akin to a clap of thunder. The shockwaves from the impact shattered glass around them, and the white hulk was barreled over onto his back. Deborah raised the blade, akin to an enormous scimitar, and it changed into a gigantic scythe.   
**  
****Enter the realm anew of the dead, Cyrus Gold.**

The Scythe went down and a brilliant column of silver-blue light tore up into the sky. The immense crumbling body of Solomon Grundy sighed in peace, though in the graveyard from which he'd arisen, a new symbol blazed. Not the symbol of the Azar, but an immense rune that glowed with a horrible red light in the form of a decayed skull, and the ground trembled. Solomon Grundy awoke again, but larger and grinning mercilessly. Many were the gifts of the God on the Great Throne, and few were they who would defy or deny them.

In New York, Deborah looked at the devastated glass while Vincent depowered his cannons and helped up several people who were toppled by the impact. Deborah raised the scythe and it transformed into a strange, onyx-colored variant of a sorcerer's staff. Strange because it was tipped with a semi-circular blade with a glowing set of gems that were patterned in a square within which was an equilateral triangle. Stranger still in that when she raised the staff, it glowed with an eldritch energy of silver hue, one that went out from the staff and repaired the damage of the battle. Smiling greatly, Deborah then turned her eyes to the north and to the ruins outside Chicago where the new Solomon Grundy had arisen. Displeased that this had happened, Deborah turned to Vincent, whose metallic hand held hers in her gauntlet, and the two vanished in a clap of thunder that left crowds moaning and holding their ears.

Outside Chicago, the new and still more massive Solomon Grundy was bellowing wordlessly when Deborah appeared in a clap of thunder before him. Armored in silver, the silver marked with the interlocking circles of the Universal Emperor, Deborah stood, replacing the staff and scythe with a firearm that looked akin to a strangely modified shotgun. Vincent for his part was now charging up his cannons again, the eldritch energy holding the daemon-hulk in rapt fascination, before launching out into interweaving spirals that tore into its flesh. The daemon howled, as the otherworldly energies proved capable of damaging it in physical and otherworldly terms alike. Deborah then fired the shotgun three times in succession, and the daemon wailed the greater, before she gestured to Vincent. Withdrawing a safe distance via a single super-strong leap into the sky, he watched as Deborah's body began to be wreathed in an immense column of smoke. The ground beneath the smoke began to smoke and blister, before corroding away altogether.

Gazing at the daemon, whose eyes suddenly widened in the outermost fear, Deborah lifted into the air, the Black Smoke forming into an impression of enormous avian wings, stretching across the sky, before her will ensured a massive column collided into the Daemon, which wailed in horror and dismay as it felt its very soul dissolved and chewed asunder by a force it could not contain nor deny. The defiled graveyard was scoured clean of its own daemonic-horror with it, and Deborah then remained hovering in the sky for a time, a time, and a half a time before landing with Vincent and the two teleporting back to New York, again assuming the form of ordinary human beings.

Deborah then looked out into the crowd, and began to speak:   
****  
These are the words of he who was, who is, who is yet to be!  
He who is not to be named, who sits on a great throne beyond the stars and the immortal transcendent fears of the starry heavens!   
To whom may he go for to seek counsel? Whom can be his guide?   
Can you who would do so see the stars in their courses, burning in flames unlimited, sustaining all that is?   
Can you who would call out against him do so other than in vain?   
Woe to those who proclaim sympathy with the poor and the needy and array against them twisted scales!   
Woe to those who proclaim farsighted status and in the here now and engage in killing of cattle and slaughtering of sheep, saying "Eat, drink, and be merry! Tomorrow we die!"  
For the countless crimes of avarice and the brutality of the strong, who profit when the weak are bowed down beneath bloodshed, the strong shall consume themselves in their own fire!   
So speaks the Universal Emperor, sovereign of all that is, seen and unseen! 

It was then that Deborah and Vincent noticed the Justice Society, moving in what they hoped was stealth. They were intending to intercept them, and perhaps to prevent another tragedy.

**Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!  
In that day, a day of gloominess and shadows, a day of suffering and of lamentation, the blood of the Earth shall be spilled and the decay of mankind avenged!  
He, the Name, ruler of Hosts, shall sit in judgment and proclaim to each according to his will! Tempt not his agents, lest in mistaken animosity the hand of enmity blight the potential embrace of friendship! **

It was then that the Martian Manhunter tapped her on her shoulder. Turning around gently, she looked into his eyes as he said, in perfect English:

"Are you our friend or our foe?"

Deborah said: 

**The enemy of your enemies.**

The Manhunter smiled. He made an imperceptible gesture, and the Justice Society moved back. As Deborah gestured to Vincent, the two vanished along with the rest of the Justice Society.

____________________________________________

**The outskirts of Kiev, USSR:**

The first sign that the peasants of the Soviet Union had of the arrival of the Azar was a strange phenomenon whereby the daylight became darkness and it was a strange darkness. Eerie stars gleamed with eldritch power, stars that seemed audibly to hiss and speak in an alien tongue. Eyes and minds then beheld a great figure on a golden throne in the form of an enormous skull, clad in red, a great white sceptre near to it. The figure looked at them kindly from a realm of ivory and gold, and bluebirds sang around it.

The second was when animals suddenly began howling in utter fear before several of  them fell dead as though smote in wrath, with strange deformities. Insects around the outskirts of Kiev fell dead altogether, covering the ground with many and many a fly, awing some peasants with just how many were the creeping things.

After the first phenomenon, the Kiev Special Military District had already begun to move Metallo Corps men together with a strong force of BT-7 tanks and air force troops. The monster they felt was behind this had laid waste huge chunks of the United States and Germany, so the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was going to take no chances with the appearance of this strange demon on Soviet soil proper. As the peasants watched the movement of Mk. II Metallo Corps men in strange silver armor with vaguely skull-like helmets concealing their faces, the advancing vanguard of the Worker's and Peasant's Red Army, an immense and sickly cloud of green smoke appeared and from it emerged a being in silver armor, enormous boots and gauntlets standing out in gaudy nature from the rest of that armor.

A strange figure like that of a two-headed dragon gnawing itself in crude, stylized form was emblazoned on the breastplate, and the armor gleamed with ten golden rings, one unmarked, the other nine adorned with precious jewels. The face of the daemon of elder days was concealed beneath the nose by a strange partial shield, the creature's blonde hair and blue eyes left unshielded. A great light blue cape whipped in an unnatural wind, and the Metallo Corps men opened fire first with a wave of strange beams based on the energies unleashed by the aliens whose technology the armor came from.

The blasts struck the Azar with genuine force, akin to being pelted with large rocks. Her eyes widened slightly at this, before her unseen fanged mouth widened into a hideous grin. Finally, a fight that might even be worth something. The monster then gazed upward as a set of IL-2 ground attack aircraft appeared, and she heard the clattering of armor. The planes opened up with BRS-82 rockets that pelted both the ground around the Azar, and the Azar herself. The impact of the rockets, after the first blasts of the lasers, was as nothing to the great Azar, who gazed upward with contempt. The infantry opened fire on the monster with SVT-38s, and the bullets were still more useless than were the rockets. Smirking, the Azar then flew up into the air, and her hands glowed. A wave of fireballs lanced out, annihilating without hesitation every single one of  the airplanes, before the monster flew beneath toward the tanks, exploding one with the impact of her landing, hands still glowing with the powers of lethal battle-magic. Moving at blinding speed, the Azar began to punch through other tanks and threw others around by their turrets, firing blasts of magic at some of them and savoring the impact of the explosions. As she did so, two Metallo Corps men flew toward her, firing lasers at her back, as two others fired them toward her eyes. The impact briefly again surprised her, but the monster then phased through the ground as the Metallo Corps men collided, appearing before the infantry. As she raised her hands, rings glowing, she then turned around and fired into the Metallo Corps men, savoring further the sequence of massive explosions that followed and the strange odor that came with it.

Then the monster turned to the infantry, which immediately began to flee and laughed uproariously at their fleeing, as it turned to head toward Ukraine, greeted with salt and bread by the amazed peasants and urban inhabitants of Ukraine. Snorting contemptuously at this open betrayal of the men who'd just fought, wisely, the monster summoned a great sceptre from thin air, and raised it into the sky. As the peasants cheered, an eldritch light descended from heaven and the staff glowed with a sickly light that left eerie shadows on the meadows.

The green light created the first renewed impression of foreboding. Then came the glowing lighting in the form of an immense hexacombed crackling energy-field that disintegrated whatever it struck, human, animal, wheat, and buildings alike. Then came the screams....  
 


	21. Break and Forge the Stars Anew

**Harlem, New York:**

As Deborah sat in the interior of the room within the Harlem brownstone that served as the _ad hoc_ meeting place of the Justice Society of America, she listened to the sharp questions of Hugo Danner, who hoped that his asking these questions while levitating, arms folded across each other aided the impression that they must be answered:   
  
"We encountered in Atlanta a being somewhat like you. She was blonde and looked like a human being," Deborah clenched Vincent's hand quietly in a warning, "but she had like you armor from another place. Another planet. That being single-handedly pulverized all of us, and only the Martian here managed to so much as give her a scratch." As he said this, Deborah's nine eyes widened and she suddenly looked closely at the Martian Manhunter. Remaining silent, she listened as Hugo Danner continued, "we could, if we tried, slow her down and inconvenience her. At any point we thought we were winning, she rebounded as though she wasn't scratched and we were back at square one. You, on a couple of occasions, have worn an armor of a similar nature, but without the weird proportions of those boots and gauntlets. What is she, and what are you, and what is that.....thing....looking for?"

Deborah spoke, and they were impressed that in her case her voice sounded more like a human voice than the blonde's, but with strange resonance and intonations that hinted of speech organs of strange worlds beneath strange stars, and of organs not like those of human origin: 

**The blonde you speak of is like me a being only partially of human nature and of human form. She is a being that has on our world the birth name Zazhalanzanai-Wonder Woman visibly jerked as she heard a forbidden name of whom the Olympians had whispered dark tales, darker even than those preserved in such tomes as the Al Azif of Abdul Hazred-also known as the Azar of Azarath-Diana's hand then jerked and the chair arm it was sitting on was crushed into splinters. The team started slightly but Deborah continued to speak:**

**She is indeed like, but unlike me. I am a being who works for the Cosmic Cycle of Creation, that which makes, which renews, which gives life and light to dead space. In this fashion I am called Light-Dancer, and the Voice of the Ancient Ones. I am one who brings light into darkness, and who replaces in cases where foulness walks cloaked in the debasement of light a healing and True Light that cleanses. I am also an aspect, a narrow and a martial one, via the strange alchemy that I myself do not understand, in your universes, of one of the Primordial Seven your mages call the Endless. I am, however, of the Cosmic Cycle. So, too, is she, of Destruction. Chaotic destruction, to be precise. What you saw in Atlanta, what threw you around like ragdolls and punched you across oceans, is but an amusement held by a being encompassing multiple universes, everything within them. From the lowliest of subatomic particles and the forces that sustain them to the vastest stars, star systems, and superclusters, all that is there is the Azar. If she were indeed noticing you, you would not have been thrown across continents with the force of a punch. You at best would have corroded into ashes and scattered across dimensions from the force of a glance, or would have disintegrated in a fashion not dissimilar to erasing a drawing on paper, howling in four dimensions silently as a shocking glimpse in seconds of real-time serves as an eternity within a bubble. Even when the Martian made her bleed, he did not attract her notice. He at most became someone she will immediately remove from a fight to forestall things.**

**She is those things. I, the Light-Dancer, was born Susana Aguilar in what is still eastern Turkey in this world a year from the issuance of the Alhambra Decree. In the ensuing time, from discovering my heritage, I have become an itinerant wanderer, together with the love of my immortal life by my side. I am the light that cleanses destruction and scours it, the fire that overwhelms the rainstorm and the ice, the endless distance of space made internal. In short, I am my father's, the being from whom Zezhelanzunui and I both sprang, dedicated purger of Outer Darkness wherever its more sinister manifestations appear creeping and crawling on dimensions. I find them, and I either drive them off and purge the effects, or I slay them. If that should leave the world in ruins-the Society was suddenly silent and a strange darkness appeared, lit only by nine yellow lights-then it will and that is all to say about it.**

**I am here to drive her off, and to forestall the process of conquest of your world. Aside from this, what happens here is none of my concern.**

 

The Crimson Avenger spoke: 

"So, let me get this straight: the crazy blonde chick is the bad guy, you're the good guy, and the Cosmos sent you to repair the imbalance wackadoodle caused?" 

Deborah smiled a shark's grin:   
**  
Not exactly. My sister's brutality did bring my appearance, yes, but it's a war amongst beings of higher spheres. You are the gnats who are caught in a battle of elephants. Creation and Destruction are each essential to the World as it is. Whether or not mortals benefit is entirely irrelevant. And I do suggest not trying to fight my sister. She will treat it as a nuisance of a game if she must, but woe to the inhabitants of the Earth and the Sea should one of you succeed in truly harming her mortal shell. Do not mistake the arrival of the Elder Ones from beyond the stars for Gods come down to Earth to redeem you. The Gods you revere dance in Celephais, in Kadath, or attend the High Priest in the Forbidden Citadel of Leng. They are strange beings, yes. We are older and wiser, and thus we forestall a triumph of Destruction not due it in the Cycle. We are not Good and Evil as mortals conceive of them. We are instead the protagonists of a story who know that there is a story, and that it will be whether or not we desire to hinder it. It is in awareness of this Dream that Gods draw their deepest power, but it is in calling upon the power of the Dreaming that the Old Ones were and are marked as their own. What if I told you that all that you see or seem is but dreams within dreams, plans within plans, and that even we lords of the Cycle are but the pawns of elder Lords of greater power than we could ever aspire to?**

Deborah smiled in a second shark grin, and there was a light that shone around her, and then the darkness passed. Vincent perceptibly relaxed, as she then asked: 

 

**  
So, why do you keep gazing at this armor? There must be more of a reason than two beings possessing it laying waste to cities when we fight, if it were that alone you would have called in your armed forces by now. **

 

Colonel Scott then said, "Well, in 1908 there was a strange incident. The skies over the northern hemisphere were lit by a brilliant display of lights, followed by an explosion, and then a column of flame that left flattened trees for miles around. The place was Tunguska. When this happened, the scientific agencies of the world were called in in 1909, and scoured the area clean. Japan, the then-Russian Empire and now Red Russia, China, Germany, the United States, the Limeys, the Frogs, the Krauts, and even the EyeTies all found things. We got there relatively later, and did not find as much as we expected. Mr. Danner there is actually the greatest single immediate product of that, and he wasn't associated with the Cadmus Group insofar as we know.

That same day, though, there was a freak 'meteor shower' over Pine Camp, where two glowing columns of light collided into the region with a noticeable effect that left two craters the Army uses to game trench warfare. From this, we salvaged two objects," rummaging in his briefcase, he handed two pictures to Deborah and Vincent. Deborah's eyes widened. Her mind spoke to Vincent:   
_**  
So this is what she's looking for.**_

Vincent's mind responded:

_We really go in for work when we go, don't we?_

Deborah smiled slightly and then asked:   
 **  
How many attempts have you made to use these Rings of Azar and what happened to the damned fools who tried?**

The Justice Society started, and then Deborah pointed to the one on the left:

**With this ring, she can manipulate existence at a sub-atomic level, restructuring vibration rates and even the numbers of protons in elements without a second thought, focusing this extremely finely.**

Pointing to the one on the right:

**With this, she manipulates superclusters, weaving the very fabric of space itself to her beck and call, not simply directing it, but becoming it. Any mortals who tried this, no matter what spells they used, no matter what part of the soil they hail from consecrated by any gods, will be eaten alive in fashions akin to that I mentioned earlier. Not from malice, but from the simple reality that this is a power too great for Gods to wield. They, too, would die if they used it, but it would kill them with a death of a thousand cuts.**

**How many?**

 

Colonel Scott said, "Over the last ten years, at least one hundred."

Deborah snorted.

**They were all damned fools meddling with something that no-one, regardless of power, could command.**

____________________________________________

**Kiev, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic:**

Kiev burned with a sickly green light, the aftereffects of the Azar's spell casting a strange phosphorescence upon the smouldering brick and wood. Seated on an immense throne carved from rubble and the remnants of those so unfortunate as to have been consumed in the blast, the Azar gazed out into the interior of the Soviet Union. Even now the Kiev Military District was sending a new and still larger force. The monster snorted. The force sent would have barreled over Kryptonians and the monster had swatted it aside with ease. This new army, as her Second Sight showed, was immensely formidable. New weapons, these. Immense in size, sloped armor, but designed with a speed and power that no weapon of this age should have matched. 

Unconsciously, the creature's hand twitched and two of its rings flared with a star's light next to which the pallorous jade phosphorescence coating the city dimmed. The same technology that had caused genuine pain was in that armor, and it was also in the armor on those soldiers who were even now flying. This was a strong force indeed. The rings glowed brighter, illuminating the mouth of the Azar and her chin, as her cheeks vanished and a row of serrated shark-like teeth began to form.

The monster smiled, and for the first time in a long time of her own volition, the humanity of the being's face disappeared and for a moment a glamour failed as a second face with dark green scales and fangs appeared on the side of the one that gaze, the human frame disappearing for a moment in favor of something not at its full scale, but immense enough to be the tallest thing in the rubble of the once-vast city. A rumbling creaking sound followed, akin to boulders grinding together as words were spoken in a tongue ancient before the first children of men gazed unthinkingly on the stars of the primordial sky. An unnatural wind began to ripple through the city, the phosphorescence in the city shifting color from green to something only approximately akin to a color known to the human race. The monster on the throne again seemed human in shape, though the being's height and mass underwent a profound increase in size, as had the throne itself. The rumbling words continued, and the unnatural wind in turn was succeeded by an unnatural silence and for a time a darkness of strange form, lit only by the two stars in the creature's skull, a silence that was oppressive no less by means of the passing of the darkness and the renewal of the strange color-like phosphoresence that covered a necropolis that had once been one of the greatest cities of the Soviet Union.

The men of the Special Assault Force were awed by the eerie lights that manifested around them, and then froze in place, experiencing timeless wonders as their bodies were stripped into sub-atomic dust and re-assembled in the blink of an eye. Screaming inwardly the dying death of a mortal man, they awoke as Immortals of Azarath cleansed of all human failings, gods among men. It was then that a glowing column of light shone on Kiev, a light that illuminated the scattered ashes of one of the hidden priests of Kiev, who awoke clad in white, hooded in a dark green hood with a cape that billowed in an unnatural wind.   
**  
I AM THE SPECTRE, THE ANIMATE WRATH OF THE VOICE. NONE MAY DEFY HE WHO WAS, HE WHO IS, HE WHO IS YET TO COME. YOU HAVE SPOKEN BLASPHEMY AND SEEK TO DEFILE THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF EXISTENCE ITSELF, AND I SAY YOU SHALL FAIL! SO SPEAKS THE SPECTRE!**

The Azar yawned slightly and then said:

**At last, a real fight with someone other than my high-born kin. If the animate wrath of the Triune is worth anything at all, and I rather doubt that it is, what with the successes of the Muslims and the atheists in this very soil itself in dismantling its artifacts, then may it strike me. I have been bored with the limited options for a fight here, so get on with it. **

 

The Spectre then hurled himself at the Azar with blinding speed, as she resumed normal human size and formed an immense battle-axe and shield emblazoned with the speech of Azarath, laughing with a guttural and inhuman sound.....

_________________________________

**Harlem, New York:**

Vincent, Deborah said, grasping his hand.

"Yes, dear?"

**We have to go. Now. The Spectre's awoken, and if we do not move soon, the children of Kadath will be butchered with impunity and this dimension shall see worse than the scouring of continents.**

Before the collective neurons of the Justice Society registered it, the very air around them shimmered with a strange light and then they vanished into thin air.


	22. Scourge of God

 

 

 

 

**Kiev, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic:**

The Azar hurled herself forward with blinding speed, throwing her axe toward the neck of the Spectre. With uncanny reflexes, the Spectre grasped the axe in a sudden movement that created a thunderclap and a tremendous windstorm, the shockwaves scattering piles of rubble in what had once been Kiev.  
**  
****Impressive** , the Azar mocked, **but you are a God, and now, now I say to you that you face a being as beyond you as you are beyond mortals of any race that mewls and howls at the uncaring stars and demands from them their own purpose.**

The Azar then increased the force of the axe in the Spectre's hands, seeking in the process to shatter the Spectre's bones. For a time the two maintained an even contest, but as the Spectre began to feel slight desperation, his mouth opened and a strange sound issued forth. The Azar removed the axe from his hands, and both the axe and the shield disappeared as she fell to her knees, clasping her hands to her ears. The sound began to turn into a yellowish light, and then the sonic beam launched forth, slicing into the Azar's face and neck. The injury, however, proved merely superficial and healed, and the Azar remained clutching her ears as the Spectre hovered forth, only to be caught by an uppercut that sent him into the ionosphere.

**I forget that when omniscient beings fight each other that omniscience is canceled. Should make this more inter** -the Spectre descended from the sky again with a blinding speed and caught the Azar with a double-barreled blast of beams of concentrated Power from the Presence. These beams made the Azar totter slightly, and then she stood tall and confident, beginning to form a weapon that bore a sinister resemblance to a mace, but a mace of no earthly metal. The beams struck her again, and again she tottered, blasted back a few steps by the impact. Again the beams surged, as the Azar formed anew the same shield as previously and with it the mace, the Ten Rings flashing with a brilliant light. Suddenly the Azar flew upward to the Spectre, whose beams missed by the narrowest of margins and erased entire elements of continental shelf and the seas alike, as the Azar's mace collided with the Spectre's body with a smashing glowing light that dimmed out the Sun over parts of the world and turned night into a brilliant day in others.

The Spectre, seemingly unharmed, then unleashed eye beams at the Azar that threw her down toward the coastline of the Lebanon, outside the ruins of Tyre. As she landed with a shattering impact that created a crater in the form of three interlocking circles, the Spectre hovered over her, and then focused a blast of the same force that had knocked her around, smiling as the force fractured the bones in the Azar's right arm, pulping them. The Azar remained still and the Spectre continued to hover, before a tremendous and awful sound like that of a foghorn mixed with a primordial monster of antediluvian power sounded, the sound causing the Spectre's human host to go into epileptic spasms and thus leaving the Spectre himself helpless as the monster rose up, her useless arm glowing and restoring itself.

**You have the attention of Zezhelanzunui of the Central Citadel of the mighty realm of Azarath, Spectre. Woe to the inhabitants of the Earth and the Sea, for fire has come upon you from Heaven. This is a day of gloominess and of dark clouds, of Old Night descending from the skies and becoming manifest. It is a day when I have come among you not to bring peace but a sword, to set mothers against their children, fathers against their daughters, to make the Earth groan with the blood of millions that waters its life, and to then ensure that life becomes as Gods, but longing for Death and incapable ever of truly dying.**

The being that stood before him was not human, but neither was it some ape-like monster with greenish skin and two heads, though the impression did linger at times for the Spectre and for beings like himself. Rather it seemed the very animate fabric of Existence itself had taken on form, a form that was all things, natural and geometric, dancing lights and utterly smothering darkness. Within this strange being, fourteen eyes of golden hue gleamed, whether it was fourteen or twenty-eight or on one head or two was seemingly dependent on when the abomination was glimpsed. Five hundred meters tall, and of mountainous bulk, the iridiscent, jetty being at times seemed to gleam as the night sky walking, immense galaxies and stars that burned with heat, the vacuum of space that withered with a frosty touch that turned fire to ice and ice to a heated smouldering lava that ate what it touched.

The creature roared again with that same primordial foghorn-sound and this time the Spectre himself felt the blast, and as the Azar moved toward him, the Spectre fired a massive column of flame at the monster, with an impact sufficient to eradicate from existence the entire eastern coast of the Mediterranean, sea, land, and life alike wiped from existence with impartiality. The smoke that rose from this was foul in smell, a towering column visible from space, yet from the column that monster lumbered, now a colossus on four limbs, two monstrous semi-Ceratopsid heads with gnashing fanged mouths, each with fourteen eyes gleaming. Immense wings were visible on either side, and a monstrous tail tipped with an immense club at the end was visible also. Awed at the sight, the Spectre fired another such column of flame, as more of the Earth disappeared beneath the blast, and the immense footsteps of the monster continued, but as the blast became the greater and consumed ever more of the Earth with it, the footsteps halted.

It was a brilliant daylight at the time in the shattered remnants of the westernmost zone where Europe met Asia, where gibbering survivors spoke of a hideous flame and of the sensation of an immense force sucking in others, devouring them with impartiality. The brilliant daylight faded and strange stars appeared over the Earth for a brief moment, as the immense alien monstrosity re-assumed human shape, and then flew toward the Spectre with a joyous shout of laughter. The impact was thunderous, and the force of the collision drove both battling gods into the Zagros Mountains, obliterated altogether by the impact, and the skies echoed with the sound of blows of fists and of maces, the  wind carrying with it inhuman gutturals spoken in a fashion no person who heard them could understand or forget.

Within the actual fight itself, the Azar's impact was greeted by the Spectre by his jamming an immense column of light into the Azar's eye, the monster consuming it as that eye glowed with an unholy light, and forming an immense mace that was blocked by fields of Divine power, but barely, and with impacts that led to both combatants spiraling around in the air, as the Spectre then fired more of his eyebeams into the Azar's face, forcing the monster to let go of him briefly, and then forced open the Azar's throat and fired the beams right inside the monster's mouth, but in turn the Azar's body glowed and the creature threw its mace into him, before firing a purple beam from its mouth that threw the Spectre back and then resuming the constricting grasp it held the Spectre in, eyes no longer human but burning stars, roaring insults and profanity into the Spectre's ear in her father's own true language.

This had taken the two over Baghdad, when the Spectre formed a glowing column of iridiscent light that blasted the Azar off of him, and with gestures of willpower constricted the Azar in his own smothering power, firing beams and even fireballs in a continuous spasm of light, as the Earth continued to corrode beneath them, Existence becoming Un-Existence. Thus was it that the two had fallen into the Zagros right before an immense area of the Void, the Spectre holding the Azar in an omnipotent constriction and continuing to blast her as she fell, throwing entire mountains upon her, forming an immense light-construct in the form of three interlocking circles that glowed and crackled with a lightning-like appearance and adding this to the continual rain of mountains and light.

After an hour's worth of such attacks, Deborah and Vincent gazed as the Spectre hovered, smiling triumphantly.

"Um, Deb, should we move before or after things get bad?" Deborah's nine eyes closed and she then whispered **_After. The monster's aiming anew to remake this world in her own image and in her own likeness. The Spectre aids her even as he tries to harm her. We cannot move until he is out of the way, as that will reveal how ambitious this second attempt at this is._**

The Spectre then saw one of the mountains he'd toppled that had fallen more or less recognizably as a mountain thrown into the air as though it was a toy, and the Azar rose from the ashes, hair frazzled, mouth marked by a deranged shark's grin, eyes gleaming with sunlike brilliance, and then her Ten Rings flashed and hurled lines of energy right toward the Spectre, who at first blocked them once more with the Divine Shield of the Presence, but then that Shield manifested as circles within circles and shattered. The Azar, amused, then hovered, fists glowing with an unholy blackish-bluish-greenish color, then fired this unholy light right at the Spectre, forming around him a strange pattern akin to a serpent devouring its own tail, the serpent coated in spikes.  
**And now, now I say to you, that you have my undivided attention. You are the first credible opponent outside my family I have faced in aeons, and so now you find out why it is best to make me an enemy when I notice you not.**

The monster looked at the Spectre and then an eerie indigo glow began to form about its mouth, the light spiraling in in two long crackling arms, as the Spectre exerted with all his might to free himself from the constrictions that held him, and found to first amazement and then consernation that the more he struggled, the stronger those bonds themselves became......


End file.
